Stoppage to hit 6000 Air N.Z. passengers

Press, 3 February 1986, Page 1

Stoppage to hit 6000 Air N.Z. passengers

Air New Zealand is unlikely to put on extra flights for the 6000 or 7000 domestic passengers affected by today’s stop-work meetings of airline pilots.

The meetings in Christchurch, Wellington, and Auckland are expected to ground all Air New Zealand flights until about 2 p.m.

A public affairs spokesman for the airline, Mr Vern Mitchell, said last evening that no extra flights had been planned. He said there might be extra flights but this would depend on the resources and aircraft available.

Passengers affected by the stop-work meeting’ ings should get in touch with Air New Zealand and try to book on a flight after 2 p.m. The only flights before the meetings, which begin at 9.15 a.m., would be with aircraft that had been away from their

base for the night, he said.

Mr Mitchell said that if flights resumed at 2 p.m., nearly 100 domestic flights and two international flights would have been affected. This .would affect between 6000 and 7000 passengers. Both international flights would take off after the stop-work meetings.

Air New Zealand had offered the Airline Pilots’ Association several options to avoid grounding the flights. These included flying key association members to the various meetings, he said.

The association’s industrial director, Captain Tony Dodwell, said the meetings should not last more than two hours, and pilots should be ready to

fly by 2 p.m.

The inconvenience to the public was regretted, but the meetings had been timed to cause the least disruption to international flights. The stop-work meetings were the only way to gather pilots in one place to discuss their grievances, he said. Most airline pilots were conservative when it came to industrial matters, he said. The stopwork meetings were a measure of the strained relationship that had developed with the airline.

The real problem was as much the airline’s attitude as the specific issues of remuneration, training, and manning levels. Captain Dodwell said he could not predict what would result from the meetings today. He said the long-standing resentment of some pilots meant that industrial action was no longer the impossibility that it had been in the past.