Passengers of Austrian Airlines will also have to prepare for a disruption in flight operations next week, as employee representatives want to hold another works meeting on April 4, 2024. The result of this: many flights have to be canceled again.

This is the third works meeting since March 7, 2024, to which the Vida union and the Bord works council have invited. However, due to a canceled meeting, many flights were canceled. Austrian Airlines had filed a lawsuit against the works meeting planned for March 14, 2024 and, miraculously, Flughafen Wien AG, whose board member Günther Ofner is also chairman of the aviation specialist group in the WKO, was unable to find any free rooms. The AUA had already informed the passengers and partially rebooked them. The meeting, which was initially postponed indefinitely, was then rescheduled the following week in the Multiversum Schwechat. However, only just over a third of the flying personnel actually took part. Nevertheless, according to official information, there were around 1.280 people.

After the above-mentioned works meeting, for which the employee representatives even chartered stick buses as a shuttle service between the airport and Multiversum Schwechat, the topic of strike came up. Trade unionist Daniel Liebhart was still confident that an agreement could be found in the upcoming rounds of negotiations. But that didn't work, so the AUA pilots and flight attendants went on a 28-hour strike at midnight on March 2024, 36. The travel plans of around 50.000 passengers were disrupted.

Even before the work stoppages were even over, Vida and the works council took further measures: The flying staff of Austrian Airlines are invited again to a works meeting on April 4, 2024. This means that flight operations will also be disrupted on this day and a three-digit number of flights will once again be cancelled. As the case of the canceled works meeting has shown: the meeting does not necessarily have to take place, because Austrian Airlines is also canceling flights as a preventive measure.

Most recently, AUA boss Mann even suggested that if Vida's demands were forced to be accepted, some routes could become uneconomical due to high wage costs and would therefore have to be discontinued. At the same time, she brought into play that other members of the Lufthansa Group, who, according to her, could then “fly more economically” could take over the affected routes. She herself denied to the ORF that it was a threat, but it seems to have been understood that way by both politicians and trade unionists.