Lufthansa warns of more staff cuts and disposal of more planes

Lufthansa has warned that it will be forced to cut more jobs and dispose of a further 50 jets, due to a “significantly lower” recovery in air traffic as a brief boost in demand during the holiday season fades away. The German carrier, which secured a E9b bailout from Berlin in June, said it expected to operate between 20 and 30% of its capacity in the last three months of the year compared with pre-crisis levels, down from an earlier forecast of 50%. The company’s shares fell 10% to E7.75 by late Monday afternoon in Frankfurt to their lowest level in more than a month. The group, which includes brands such as Austrian, Brussels, Swiss and Eurowings, had already announced that it will be faced with at least 22,000 excess staff as a result of Covid-19, and cautioned that those numbers would need to be “further adjusted”. Lufthansa said 20% of management positions will be axed next year, although it refused to specify how many more jobs would be at risk in total. Approximately 87,000 of the group’s 130,000 employees are still enrolled in Germany’s Kurzarbeit furlough scheme alone. Mira Neumaier, an official at the German services union Verdi, one of several unions representing Lufthansa staff, criticised the announcement of further redundancies. “The company will not be rescued by job cuts alone,” she said, adding that “forward-looking concepts are still missing” from the airline’s senior management. Lufthansa, which unlike most of its competitors owned about 760 jets when the pandemic hit, said it would permanently decommission a total of 150 planes, and confirmed that all 14 of its Airbus A380s would be put in “long-term storage”, along with 10 A340-600s. Those decisions would lead to a E1.1b writedown in its Q3 results, the company said.<br/>