Finnair has cancelled 230 flights this summer due to resource constraints. The flight cancellations will affect approximately 28,000 customers, the airline's communications director Päivyt Tallqvist told Yle on Saturday.
The cancellations affect individual flights on various routes between 1 June and 11 August. Of the cancelled flights, 70 are long-haul flights while 160 are narrow-body, single-aisle flights, typically used for domestic and short-haul flights.
According to Tallqvist, customers were notified directly about the flights last week and offered re-routing.
Pilots’ contract dispute since last year
According to Tallqvist, the cancellations are due to redundancy talks that the airline has been conducting with pilots since February.
"Due to the pilots' industrial action, the future of Finnair's cooperation with Qantas is uncertain. We have not been able to operate the flights for Qantas that we should have, according to the agreements. This is the reason for the possible long-term reduction in work, which is why we started change negotiations earlier this spring," Tallqvist said.
The Finnish flag carrier has leased two Airbus A330 wide-body aircraft with their crews to the Australian airline Qantas for two years. Finnair has no use for the aircraft due to the ban on flights through Russian airspace, which were key to the airline’s successful Asian strategy before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The aircraft now fly from Sydney to Bangkok and Singapore, employing 90 pilots.
Finnair flies over 300 flights daily during the summer, Tallqvist noted.
"We had training and recruitment planned for the spring to support this summer’s flights, but of course we cannot recruit new pilots during the change negotiations," she said.
The company has held collective bargaining negotiations since last autumn with the Finnish Pilots’ Association, which represents more than 1,400 professional pilots in the country. The two sides disagree over working conditions and wages.
The suspension of training and recruitment has caused a resource shortage for two months of the summer, which has led to the flight cancellations.
On Wednesday, the national airline unveiled its summer schedule, including a new route from Kittilä in northern Finland to Alta in northern Norway. Finnair also plans to expand flights to the Norwegian cities of Tromsø and Kirkenes.
