Air Malta filed a protest in court holding the Airline Pilots Association Malta (ALPA) responsible for damages with respect to its directives to pilots delaying Air Malta flights by 30 minutes.

The airline said in a statement it presented an application to the Industrial Tribunal to hear the case with urgency.

It said the union was currently delaying Air Malta flights by 30 minutes in relation to an issue on the introduction of a new rostering software for pilots. Despite several meetings a resolution to this dispute was not found.

Air Malta called upon ALPA to stop its actions and embrace change in the interest of the airline, its customer, local tourism stakeholders and all the other Air Malta employees.

In its application the airline stated that the union’s actions were disproportionately severe and negatively affecting Air Malta’s operations while creating unnecessary substantial costs for the airline. Moreover, such actions were harming Air Malta’s reputation amongst its customers and its airline partners and were creating unnecessary inconveniences to its passengers.

Air Malta said that the new software was a state-of-the-art system used by over 80 international airlines and was integrated with other IT systems already deployed at Air Malta. It was aimed to provide the airline with a crew resources management software solution that would help the airline allocate its crew resources more efficiently.

The airline said that the main objections by ALPA were that the roster of a particular pilot was not made available to other pilots, as was the case with the previous system. The airline strongly believed that such an objection was not a valid reason for the airline to continue operating with the old in-house crew rostering system, which, apart from having exceeded its life, required extensive constant reprogramming to meet new regulations and the new collective agreement limitations. With the new system individual roster information could only be shared with the consent of the respective crew member.