A potentially major damaging strike may have been avoided now that the British Airline Pilots’ Association (BALPA) has suspended serving ‘strike notice’ on easyJet – Europe’s second largest international scheduled airline.

 

This follows both parties studying a new set of proposals to mitigate pilot fatigue, which has been at the heart of the dispute. These new proposals are now being put to the pilots in a consultative ballot, overriding a strong vote in favour of industrial action [for now], which was taken earlier this week.

 

Commenting on this positive development, Brian Strutton, BALPA General Secretary said: “We have been working hard today and over the last few days to find a solution to this dispute about pilot fatigue.

 

 

NEW EASYJET MANAGEMENT PROPOSALS

“easyJet management have put a proposal on the table that the BALPA team feel has closed the gap between us considerably on a range of issues. We therefore feel it is right and proper to consult with our members at this stage and so we are suspending serving notice of industrial action on the company.

 

“This does not mean the dispute is over, but it does mean that we have made sufficient progress to take an offer to pilots in easyJet for their consideration.

 

“We take the issue of pilot fatigue extremely seriously, and hope that today’s proposals will form the basis of a strong agreement between easyJet and its pilots.”

 

 

EASYJET IS A HUGE EUROPEAN AIRLINE NOW

More than 16m passengers travelled with easyJet in the summer months between 26 June and September 5 alone and only recently (23 September) it recorded its busiest day, handling 255,000 passengers in a single 24-hour period [147,000 used UK airports for one leg of their trip-Ed] across more than 1,600 flights in its network.

 

It is often not realised that easyJet is actually the second largest international airline in the world, having carried 62.6m scheduled passengers in 2015, ahead of Emirates with 51.03m, Lufthansa 46.9m and British Airways with 36.9m. Only Ryanair carried more passengers than easyJet last year, with 101.4m scheduled passengers.