NWA says ‘normal’; union says no way

08/22/2005

Tony Kennedy and Liz Fedor,
Star Tribune
August 22, 2005

The second day of a strike by mechanics at Northwest Airlines brought conflicting reports on the number of delayed and canceled flights.

Northwest described its operations over the weekend as normal, and airport officials agreed.

But striking members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) and other observers said cancellations and delays were running higher than normal.

“We know that Northwest has continually been deceiving the public about how well things are going,” said Steve MacFarlane, AMFA’s assistant national director.

Northwest declined to release specific performance data, but the true measure of how well its replacement mechanics are doing could come today, as business travelers return to the air in full force.

“Our operational performance is consistent with other weekends during the summer,” Northwest spokesman Kurt Ebenhoch said Sunday afternoon.

Northwest had about 1,380 flights scheduled Sunday, up from about 1,215 on Saturday.

The airline has an average of 1,473 daily flights scheduled for the coming week.

Late Sunday afternoon in the Twin Cities, four of 124 Northwest flights on the flight information displays were listed as canceled. Fewer than a dozen were delayed by an hour.

The worst delay on Sunday afternoon appeared to be a flight from Alberta, Canada, expected some eight hours after its scheduled arrival time.

Minneapolis

A Northwest flight from Fort Myers, Fla., was canceled Sunday morning, causing grief for traveler Marion Gangras of Minneapolis.

“It was a maintenance issue,” she said, adding later: “It just goes to show how important they [the mechanics] are.”

Her plane was supposed to depart at 9:40 a.m., but passengers were taken off the plane at 10:20 a.m. She eventually got on a later flight and was collecting her luggage at the Lindbergh terminal shortly before 5 p.m.

A couple returning from New York said they saw no disruptions to their flight: “We were early,” said Juliet Glass of Minneapolis. “Totally supportive of the mechanics’ right to strike. Happy that we didn’t get delayed,” said Jeff Lomonaco.

The strike by Northwest’s mechanics union began Friday night, after AMFA rejected a contract that would have saved Northwest $176 million, but which would have resulted in layoffs of about 2,000 union members and 25 percent pay cuts for those remaining.

Northwest has insisted that 1,200 replacement mechanics, 300 managers and its outside vendors would keep its fleet operating at full schedule.

MacFarlane cited 45 cancellations on Saturday and 54 canceled flights on Sunday as evidence that Northwest is struggling to operate its schedule.

But Ebenhoch said Saturday storms in parts of the Midwest—not replacement mechanics—were to blame for some performance problems.

In addition, he said replacement workers are whittling away the backlog of work created by a slowdown of union mechanics on Friday.

Joe Brancatelli, an airline expert who operates a website for business travelers, http://www.joesentme.com, said his own independent research shows that Northwest flights have been chronically late since the strike began.

On Sunday, for instance, eight of nine flights from Detroit to Minneapolis-St. Paul arrived late, including one that was more than two hours late, Brancatelli said. He tracked the flights using Northwest’s own website.

The veteran travel writer from Cold Spring, N.Y., said only 46 of 99 Northwest flights that he tracked on Saturday ran on time. The longest delay in that batch of flights was a six-hour wait for passengers en route to Detroit from Orlando, he said.

Brancatelli said the company’s reports that it is operating normally with replacement mechanics shouldn’t be taken at face value.

“They’ll say anything if they think they can get away with it,” he said. “My readers don’t care who is winning or losing the strike, they just want to know if their flight is going to be on time.”

Northwest’s Ebenhoch said Sunday that Brancatelli’s sampling “was unscientific.”

On Saturday afternoon, Wall Street analyst Jamie Baker, of J.P. Morgan, noted that 60 percent of Twin Cities departures were leaving the gate within 15 minutes of schedule, while it was about 56 percent in Detroit.

Memphis

In Memphis, flight arrival and departure screens showed delays and cancellations scattered through the 95 or so flights.

At 3 p.m., six afternoon flights had been canceled, despite good weather.

“That’s extremely rare,” said Billy Brant, a local union chairman and strike organizer.

Memphis airport officials referred all calls to Northwest.

Hal Myers, a spokesman for the Northwest pilots union, said Sunday night that Northwest’s overall operation “still seems to be running primarily smoothly with regard to cancellations and delays.”

Myers, a pilot, said the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) has been monitoring Northwest’s performance during the initial days of the strike and few pilots have called in to ALPA’s Safety Operations Center.

Patrick Hogan, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC), said Sunday that he had not detected major problems at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

“What I’m seeing appears to be what I would have seen last weekend,” Hogan said. “I’m really not seeing a significant change due to the strike.”

Hogan said some travelers are analyzing operations in the context of the strike. However, he added, “We have the eighth busiest airfield in the world, so there are always going to be a number of delays and cancellations.”

Detroit

Bob Rose, president of Detroit-based AMFA Local 5, said he received internal reports from a Northwest employee showing 85 Northwest flight delays at Detroit Metro by 1 p.m. Sunday. The norm for Detroit is about 30 delays for an entire day, he said.

Northwest said it would not confirm the authenticity of the memo Rose cited.

Michael Conway, a spokesman for the Detroit Metro Airport, said that he didn’t have up-to-date flight delay information for Northwest but that Sunday had the appearance of a normal day. “It’s been a very, very quiet day,” he said.

The complete picture of Northwest’s performance may not be known until October, when the U.S. Department of Transportation will release August on-time performance measures for all airlines.