Ryanair has struck a deal with the German pilots' union which has been one of its most vocal foes during a year of industrial disputes, strikes and cancellations.
Image: Reuters/K. Pfaffenbach
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Ryanair has announced that it has reached agreement with the German pilot union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) over wages, benefits and working conditions.
The deal includes provisions on pay, pensions, pilot allowances and annual leave, but detailed documentation on the agreement is not expected to be available until the end of February.
Crucially, the agreements will apply German labor laws and not Irish labor laws — where Ryanair is based — for the airline's German-based pilots. This demand to apply local labor laws has been a central sticking point in the many industrial disputes that have beset the airline over the past year.
Since a major cancellations crisis in late 2017 was followed by several industrial disputes across Europe for Ryanair throughout 2018, the airline has been trying to reach agreement with various trade unions — a far cry from its previous policy of not recognising the workers' groups.
The agreement with VC is a particularly significant one, given that the union has consistently been at loggerheads with Ryanair. A number of German-based strikes have hit Ryanair over the past year, while Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair, has regularly decried VC as a "Lufthansa trade union."
Talks between the pair had previously broken down on several occasions but the latest deal reflects the renewed urgency with which Ryanair has approached industrial disputes in recent months, with a view to ending the uncertainty which has beset it with regard to potential strikes.
Ryanair recently agreed deals with unions in Ireland and Italy and also has accepted demands from Spanish unions to hire local staff there on Spanish contracts.
Which of the world's 60 biggest airlines is the safest? Based on 2016 air safety data, Germany's JACDEC institute has compiled a ranking of carriers, showing that humans are still the biggest risk factor in air traffic.
Image: Reuters/E. Su
Unsafe China Airlines
About 3.7 billion passengers traveled by plane in 2016. Those who chose China Airlines as their carrier subjected themselves to the biggest risk, because the Taiwanese airline came in at the bottom of JACDEC's list of 60 globally operating carriers.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/D. Chang
Colombia's Avianca no alternative
The ranking was compiled on the basis of national air safety reports of the past 30 years. It measured the number of casualties and crashes against the airlines' traveled kilometers and passenger numbers. An airline without any loss of life and planes is given an index of zero to 0,001 points. Colombia's Avianca scored a value of 0.914 - the second-worst in 2016.
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High crash risk in Indonesia, too
Traveling with Garuda Indonesia - the third-worst performer on a score of 0.770 - isn't to be recommended either. Since its founding in 1950, the airline has reported 47 accidents - 22 of which have led to a total of 583 casualties.
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Ranking unbalanced?
But JACDEC's ranking has been criticized for not separately counting technical defects, human errors, weather incidents and terrorist attacks as reasons for plane crashes. Terrorism, for example, is really an airport safety problem; it accounts for 10 percent of accidents. Simon Ashley Bennett, an air safety expert at Leicester University, says a terror attack on a plane is as unlikely as...
Image: AP
Bad weather
... an incident of freak weather leading to an accident. Latest data say that 10 percent of them can be attributed to snow, ice, fog and storms. Lightning isn't as dangerous as many believe. More prone to cause crashes are...
Image: dapd
Technology glitches
Today's modern aircraft brim with technology. Small wonder then that technical defects account for about 20 percent of accidents, says Bennett, surpassed only by the biggest cause...
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Eisele
The human factor
Airline pilots are the biggest risk factor - they cause half of all accidents these days. Interaction between human beings and ever more complicated machines is prone to lead to mistakes, with the pilot always held accountable if something goes wrong.
Image: picture alliance/ROPI
Masters in the air
Yet, the 2009 crash landing in the Hudson River by Chesley Sullenberger shows that humans' piloting skills are not obsolete in modern aviation. Sullenberger's feat was only the third crash landing on water without casualties. All 155 passengers survived.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/S. Day
Scrap heap or repair?
Strangely enough, an aircraft that has been repaired after a crash gives an airline a better score with JACDEC than one that has been scrapped. Not a few experts question whether such a plane is really safe anymore.
Image: Reuters
More ambiguities
Further reason for criticism comes from the fact that an airline taken over by a rival has its score set back to zero by JACDEC. Lauda Air's 1991 crash with more than 200 casualties (see picture), for example, didn't affect the score of Austrian Airlines, which bought Lauda in 2004. Newly-founded airlines also start with zero points.
Image: picture alliance/dpa
And the winner is...
Hongkong-based Cathay Pacific was the safest airline in 2016, according to the rankiing of the Hamburg, Germany-based institute. Runners-up were Air New Zealand and China's Hainan Airlines. Germany's flagship carrier, Lufthansa, landed in 12th place. On balance, 2016 was among the years with the fewest accidents in aviation history.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Safer but deadly, too
Last year, JACDEC counted 321 deaths from plane crashes. But the Aviation Safety Network counted four deaths more due to a different inventory method. By far the worst aviation accident was that of a Bolivian charter flight carried out by LaMia, which crashed near Medellin, killing 71 people - among them almost the entire player roster of Brazilian football club AF Chapecoense.
