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 background is that the Kranich subsidiary wants to outsource the majority of its cadets to external providers and justifies this with the declining demand for pilots for its group-owned airlines due to the corona pandemic. As far as the Cockpit Association is aware, no student pilot in the training course for the MPL license, which qualifies for flying in the cockpit at Lufthansa Passage, has so far 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 is completely unnecessarily questioning the future prospects of hundreds of young people. We strongly condemn the actions of the company's management board with regard to the flight school, the flight instructor colleagues and the way the student pilots are treated," says Markus Wahl, President of the Cockpit Association. "We demand that the student pilots complete their training in accordance with the contract and that the Bremen flight school continues to exist."
"The fact that the Ministry of Defense is lending itself to shifting power in collective bargaining and thus allowing wage evasion to be carried out using taxpayers' money is to be criticized in the strongest possible terms," said Dr. Marcel Gröls, head of collective bargaining policy at the Cockpit Association. The fact that the pilots of the Federal Government's air force have also been trained in Bremen so far speaks for the high level of training and the highly qualified staff of the traditional flight school in Bremen. "Now, with its relocation plans, the state-supported Lufthansa Group is obviously primarily concerned with getting rid of well-paid jobs and depriving the Bremen commercial pilot school of its livelihood during the Corona crisis," said Gröls.
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