WestJet faces a logistical nightmare getting planes back in the air in wake of strike

With stranded crew members and parked aircraft scattered across the country, WestJet says it’s working to recover from a logistical nightmare in the wake of a three-day strike by its unionized airline mechanics.

The strike, which began Friday evening and concluded late Sunday night, grounded 130 of the airline’s 180 planes, scuttling plans for tens of thousands of travellers. Between Thursday and Monday, 1,051 flights were cancelled, including nearly 300 on the holiday Monday alone. As of Monday, the airline said it was expecting to ground another 27 flights on Tuesday.

The company is now racing to resume normal scheduling as hundreds of crew members must be transported back to airports and onto aircraft that WestJet needs to get back into the air.

“We are grateful to be recovering our operation. However, we fully recognize the continued impact on our guests and sincerely appreciate their patience and understanding,” said WestJet Airlines president Diederik Pen.

The Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, the union that represents roughly 680 workers, including aircraft maintenance engineers, who walked off the job, said it was “grateful and relieved” to have negotiated a contract covering the next five years.

“We have requested that all AMEs return to work immediately so that we can provide the value of their labour that was the primary element in achieving this deal,” the union said in a statement.

Of the 13 airports where WestJet’s unmanned aircraft are sitting idle, only Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Winnipeg have crew bases. That means that to get its planes flying again, the company needs to prioritize transporting crew members, such as pilots and flight attendants, to smaller stations such as Kelowna, B.C., Saskatoon and Regina.

On average, WestJet said it takes 1,600 crew members to cover daily operations – and scheduling them all is intensely complicated. Because of the strike, many of those assigned schedules have either been thrown off or completely redrawn.

“These disrupted crew members are now being positioned to their home base or next scheduled destination so they can continue with their next assignments and assist us in building the network back up as quickly as possible,” WestJet spokesperson Morgan Bell said in an e-mail.

Karl Moore, a professor at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, said he expects it will take a while before the airline’s operations are humming along again.

“If there’s not enough flights, it’s harder for the pilots and the flight attendants to be where they should be,” he said.

Prof. Moore added that the aviation industry’s emphasis on a safety-first approach also means a number of routine inspections – many by the mechanics who went on strike – will need to happen before WestJet’s fleet can get airborne.

The skills possessed by aircraft mechanics have become increasingly important, Prof. Moore said, during a time when maintenance is more often done proactively than reactively.

“In the past, you’d wait till it breaks down. Whereas now, what they do is they look at the parts and go: How long has this been in service?” he said.

The union said that while it’s glad the strike helped win substantial improvements to its contract, including immediate pay increases, a full restoration of the employees’ WestJet Savings Plan and improved benefits, it regrets that the action unravelled over one of the year’s busiest travel weekends.

“We appreciate everyone’s patience in the face of cancelled flights and changing plans. Now it’s time to show the world how we make WestJet fly,” the union wrote.

This is the second tentative agreement in the dispute. Union members voted overwhelmingly to reject a tentative deal from WestJet in mid-June, after two weeks of tense talks between the two parties.

The union said Monday this tentative deal calls for an immediate pay increase of about 30 per cent compounded over the five-year agreement, half of which will be realized in the first year. And its improved benefits include gained calculations of overtime.

Prof. Moore said he expects it won’t be more than two or three days until the airline is back in order after the unexpected pause in its operations.

“The number one job in an airline is safety, above all – get the passengers safely to where they’re going, and the employees as well. And you don’t want to put that at risk at all. So, they tend to be, by most of our standards, a bit over-careful. But that’s good from a viewpoint of being a passenger.”