Updated 9.20pm with Air Malta statement

An industrial dispute currently raging at Air Malta stems from the fact that the airline does not have enough pilots for its flight schedule, the ALPA pilots union said on Wednesday. Air Malta denied in the claim.

"Air Malta is regularly rostering crew to fly to their maximum legal limits. This has led to an unprecedented level of fatigue being recorded through the official channels. The company was caught out attempting to dispatch crew without their required minimum legal rest and trying to convince them to operate beyond their prescribed maximum duty limits," the union said in a statement.

"The present rostering practices involve crew being called on their off days to operate flights. This leads to possible illegal patterns requiring the intervention of the rostering department, the crew themselves or ALPA, to identify Flight Time Limitation breaches and remove crew from their infringing duties," the union said.

Although meetings have been held between the airline and the union to implement mitigation measures, no tangible progress was made.

ALPA said it had therefore issued recommendations to their members to not operate flights beyond their published rosters to avoid illegalities.

Air Malta said on Saturday that the union's 'recommendations' were causing delays and had even caused the cancellation of a flight to Paris after many pilots called in sick and no one was found to replace them. The airline applied for and was granted a court order to stop industrial action. 

But ALPA said the court order was based around the fact that Air Malta management suspended a flight crew member without just cause. The pilot has since been reinstated and is back to flying duties. No evidence of wrongdoing could be found.

ALPA said it therefore expected the lifting of the 'unjust and cowardly decision'.  

It explained that its collective agreement laid down that every crew member was entitled to a minimum of 104 off days per calendar year.

"For the end of this year Air Malta will be unable to meet this contractual obligation. Various meetings held with management to find a solution have proved unsuccessful. Until a solution is found the airline’s schedule for December is not assured" the union said.

It also complained that Air Malta is not re-establishing pilots’ loss of licence insurance so as to use this insurance as a bargaining chip in the ongoing dispute. This insurance also forms part of the current collective agreement.

Air Malta pilots flew well below industry standards - airline

In a statement, Air Malta said its pilots flew an average of 650 hours every year - well below industry standards and the legal limit of 900 hours every year.

It said it had enough pilots to operate its schedule and the delays experienced in summer on a number of flights were the result of the union’s ‘recommendations’ to members who, contrary to previous years, were inflexible to roster changes.
The airline said it always provided its pilot community with the legal 96 days off per year.

When pilots were not given the additional eight days off per year mandated by their collective agreement, they were compensated with payment in line with the agreement.

It said it paid captains an average of €360 for every off-day they were not given. But the union now also wanted the days off apart from this payment.

Air Malta said it investigated allegations of flight time limitation breaches and its data showed that human error and IT issues were generally the root cause of these rostering mistakes which amounted to less than 0.2% of all flights. These mistakes were identified before flights were executed and corrected accordingly with mitigating actions taken thereafter.

It maintained that safety of its customers and crew was paramount and said it would never compromise on its safety record.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.