Lufthansa said it was seeking a temporary injunction Tuesday to avert a strike after cancelling nearly a third of its flights on Wednesday due to a planned 24-hour work stoppage then by its pilots. The cancellations are the latest disruption to Lufthansa's operations in a long-running pay dispute and the airline said that 876 out of roughly 3,000 flights scheduled for Wednesday have been cancelled, affecting about 100,000 passengers. The labor court in Frankfurt said a hearing on Lufthansa's injunction request was scheduled for 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday. The planned strike, the 14th to hit the airline in its dispute with the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) union, will run from midnight and affect short-haul and long-haul flights departing from German airports. Flights by Lufthansa's other airlines including Germanwings, Eurowings, Austrian Airlines, SWISS and Brussels Airlines, are not affected by the pilots' strike, Lufthansa said. Austrian and SWISS are checking whether they can use larger aircraft to increase the amount of passengers they can take. For example, the group plans to use a widebody 777 on the Vienna-Frankfurt route, it said. However, budget airline Eurowings canceled more than 60 flights on Tuesday due to a separate strike by some cabin crew in a pay dispute between management and the Verdi labor union.<br/>
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A top United executive last week reviewed the carrier's route system -- said to be the best in the world -- and publicly defined the problem that has hobbled its performance for more than a decade. "We built everything around focusing on international, which we do really well," said United President Scott Kirby. "But we let the domestic slide. {Today} United uniquely has less exposure to {domestic} markets than our competitors." Kirby, who took over as president just six weeks ago, spoke at United's investor day on Nov. 15. It may have signified the turning point United has awaited ever since Stephen Wolf, its last great CEO, departed in 1994, as the carrier laid out a new path that includes boosting domestic flying, delaying aircraft orders and unveiling a plan for low-end seats that could lure passengers from ultra-low-cost airlines. United is the only airline with hubs in the top five domestic markets of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington. Newark is the country's best trans-Atlantic hub, San Francisco is the best trans-Pacific hub, and Houston is the second best Latin America hub. But domestically, United lags American and Delta, at a time when domestic profitability lags international profitability. The clearest sign of the gap is a consistently lower profit margin. What happened? After domestic deregulation took effect in 1980, international markets remained largely regulated and profitable, Kirby said, while "domestic profitability plummeted," due to fragmented networks and a profusion of low-fare carriers. As a result, he said, "United's mindset {became}, 'we just want to fly enough domestic to feed our international flying.'"<br/>