Lufthansa strike disrupts flights

By Friday morning, departure boards at Frankfurt and Munich were filling with cancellations because Lufthansa cabin crew walked out for 22 hours, from midnight to 10 p.m. on April 10. Deutsche Welle reported the union call covered about 20,000 flight attendants at Lufthansa and its CityLine regional unit. (dw.com) The damage spread well beyond the two big hubs because CityLine crews also stopped work at nine other German airports, including Berlin, Stuttgart, and Leipzig/Halle. Deutsche Welle said Frankfurt alone canceled roughly 580 flights, while Munich canceled about 400. (dw.com) Lufthansa said the strike formally targeted departures from Germany, but airlines cannot neatly isolate a disruption like that. When an outbound plane never leaves Frankfurt, the return leg for passengers somewhere else often disappears too. (dw.com) This was not a sudden one-off. Deutsche Welle described it as Lufthansa’s third major strike wave of 2026 by April 10, after pilot action in February and March had already disrupted tens of thousands of travelers. (dw.com) The union behind the April 10 walkout is called UFO, short for the Independent Flight Attendants Organization, and it has been fighting Lufthansa on two fronts at once. One dispute is over wages for cabin crew, and the other is over Lufthansa CityLine, which the airline plans to shut down and replace with another regional setup. (dw.com) Lufthansa has argued it does not have room to absorb bigger labor costs after a weak 2025. Deutsche Welle reported in February that the airline’s earnings had fallen sharply, and Lufthansa had already announced 4,000 job cuts, about 4 percent of its workforce. (dw.com) That cost pressure helps explain why Germany’s biggest airline keeps ending up in public labor fights. Lufthansa is also dealing with aircraft delivery delays and debt, so every contract negotiation now lands in a company that is trying to cut costs while unions are trying to protect pay, pensions, or jobs. (dw.com) The timing made the April 10 stoppage worse for passengers because it hit during late Easter travel, when airports are already running close to full. Lufthansa’s own travel notices told affected customers to check flight status and said passengers could usually rebook for free or request a refund if their trip was disrupted by strike-related schedule changes. (lufthansa.com) By Saturday, April 11, Lufthansa said it expected operations to return to “virtually a full number of flights,” though it still warned of isolated delays and cancellations from aircraft and crew being out of position. A one-day strike can end on paper at 10 p.m., but the network usually needs another day to put all the pieces back in place. (dw.com)