Tue, Aug 23, 2005
AMFA: Northwest Airlines On-Time Performance Drops to 50
Percent Over Weekend; Only 15 FAA Inspectors Have Been Assigned to
Northwest Worldwide
The war of words is ON!
AMFA, apparently not happy with the lack of doom and gloom in the
wake of their strike of Northwest Airlines has raised the bar on
its rhetoric with the following statement...
AMFA Statement
During the first weekend of a mechanics' strike, Northwest
Airlines' on-time performance fell to about 50 percent, according
to figures reported in JoeSentMe.com, an independent online
publication for business travelers edited by Joe Brancatelli,
former editor of business travel publication The Frequent Flier.
This compares with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figure of 78
percent for Northwest's average on-time performance over the first
six months of 2005 (www.transtats.bts.gov).
Brancatelli's tracking of 99 randomly chosen Northwest U.S. and
Canadian flights each day yielded an average 46.5 percent on-time
performance for Saturday and 53.5 percent on Sunday, or an average
of about 50 percent for the two-day period. His information source
for actual-versus-scheduled departure and arrival times was
Northwest's website. The average delay on Saturday was one hour and
eleven minutes. On Sunday, it was one hour and six minutes. There
were two cancellations on Saturday and three on Sunday. The
Northwest website attributed many of the delays to "scheduled
maintenance" and "non-scheduled maintenance."
"Northwest Airlines has promised investors and travelers that
the airline would maintain their normal on-time record during the
strike. They are under extraordinary pressure to keep that promise,
even if it means misrepresenting the facts as reported on their own
website," said O.V. Delle-Femine, national director of the Aircraft
Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA). Northwest is claiming that
its on-time performance was normal over the weekend.
"Northwest's current
problems with delays and cancellations are going to get much worse
through the rest of August, as understaffed and under-trained
replacement mechanics fall further behind and as delays cause
flight crews to reach their legal limits for on-duty time,"
Delle-Femine predicted. About 1,500 replacement workers are
attempting to do the work of 4,500 AMFA members.
Another factor that will make it more difficult for Northwest to
maintain a normal flight schedule is the shortage of FAA inspectors
assigned to monitor the replacement workers. According to Jim
Pratt, a national officer with PASS, the FAA inspectors' union, "13
FAA airworthiness inspectors have been assigned for the entire
world system of Northwest, for the hundreds of locations where
Northwest is going to do maintenance. I hardly think this qualifies
as 'close monitoring.'" Even when you add the two FAA avionics
inspectors assigned to the Northwest system, the total is only 15
inspectors worldwide. The FAA had said it would assign enough
inspectors to "closely monitor" the replacement workers.
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