FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - Pilots and flight attendants at Lufthansa subsidiary Discover Airlines are planning to strike together this Friday. The company has already returned ten flights that it was supposed to fly for its parent company Lufthansa in Munich. Lufthansa wanted to offer the connections elsewhere. The consequences for its own Discover flights from Frankfurt were still unclear on the eve of the day-long strike.

Everything was being done to get as many passengers as possible to their destinations, a Discover spokeswoman had repeatedly emphasized. The company had originally spoken of around 20 departures from Frankfurt during the strike period. On Thursday, 14 departures were listed on the airport's flight schedule for the following day, of which one to Cancun in Mexico was canceled. Of 15 planned landings, two from Cancun and Philadelphia were canceled. Strikes can only affect departures from Germany, but this can also have consequences for connecting flights.

The Vereinigung Cockpit pilots' union has called on its members to go on a full-day strike. This was later joined by the cabin crew union Ufo with a 24-hour warning strike without prior ballot. At issue are the first collective wage agreements at the vacation airline, which was only founded two and a half years ago and currently has 24 aircraft. The cooperation between the crews is intended to make it more difficult for the company to find sufficient staff for the flights, according to union circles.

An initial warning strike by the pilots on the day before Christmas Eve had been relatively mild for most passengers. Discover was able to reschedule flights to times outside the five-hour strike window at the time. A longer strike, on the other hand, was more likely to result in flight cancellations.

The Lufthansa Group's vacation airline was initially launched in the coronavirus summer of 2021 under the name "Eurowings Discover" and later renamed "Discover Airlines". Discover is intended to be more cost-effective than the Lufthansa core brand and compete with vacation airlines such as Condor./ceb/DP/jha