According to the Cockpit Association, around 100 flight students are suing Lufthansa Aviation Training for compliance with the training contracts they have concluded in order to be able to continue and complete their training. The cases are negotiated before the labor court in Frankfurt am Main.

The reason for this is that the Kranich subsidiary wants to outsource the majority of the cadets to external providers and justifies this with the declining need for pilots for their group airlines due to the corona pandemic. As far as the Cockpit Association is aware, no student pilot or student pilot in the training course for the MPL license, which qualifies for flying in the cockpit at Lufthansa Passenger Airlines, has accepted the LAT's “outsourcing offer”.

“The young people do not want to be forced to change their training contracts unilaterally. If they were outsourced to external flight schools, they would have the disadvantage that they would no longer meet the criteria for direct employability at Lufthansa and would therefore have to go through a new selection process with high failure rates. This direct adjustability at Lufthansa has always been an elementary component in the recruitment of new flight students. For the majority of them, it was of crucial importance to opt for the expensive and demanding apprenticeship at Lufthansa. For this reason, according to the contract, their training must also take place at the Lufthansa pilot school in Bremen, ”wrote the VC in a broadcast.

At the moment, the LAT only wants to continue training those student pilots who have already successfully completed their training phase in Phoenix (USA). The company is now requesting up to 35.000 euros from these. This has not been the case so far and, in the opinion of the VC, represents a significant deviation and significant deterioration of the training offerings that were once advertised.

“It is extremely strange how Lufthansa unnecessarily questions the future prospects of hundreds of young people. We strongly condemn the actions of the group's board of directors with regard to the flight school, the flight instructors and the way they deal with the flight students, ”says Markus Wahl, President of the Cockpit Association. "We demand the contract-compliant final training of the flight students as well as the continuation of the Bremen flight school."

“The fact that the Ministry of Defense is offering itself for power shifts in collective bargaining policy and that collective bargaining can thus be committed with tax money is to be criticized in the strongest terms,” said Dr. Marcel Gröls, Head of Tariff Policy at the Vereinigung Cockpit. The fact that the federal government's flight readiness pilots have also been trained in Bremen so far speaks for the high level of training and for the highly qualified staff of the traditional flight school in Bremen. "Now the state-supported Lufthansa group with its relocation plans is obviously primarily about getting rid of well-paid jobs and depriving the Bremen commercial aviation school of its livelihood during the corona crisis," said Gröls.