Heavenly Greed
On July 6, passengers on dozens of Aeroflot flights were unable to depart on time from Sheremetyevo Airport because the airline cancelled or rescheduled flights. The national carrier has been reportedly disrupting its flight schedule more and more often lately. The version is that this is due to the personnel shortage that has hit Aeroflot due to the company's management's desire to save on payments.
According to media reports, a total of 25 flights departing from Sheremetyevo were rescheduled.
The company cited bad weather – allegedly, because of Hurricane Orhan that hit the capital region, planes from previous flights could not return to Moscow to pick up passengers. However, this explanation is more like an excuse. Firstly, despite the hurricane, other capital airports and airlines continued to operate as usual. Secondly, Aeroflot had problems with cancellation and rescheduling of flights before. For example, on June 29, the plane flying to Novosibirsk did not depart at the appointed time. The departure was rescheduled several times and was ultimately delayed by 17 hours. Delays in sending planes were also observed in the following days. On July 7, when the hurricane had long passed, Aeroflot cancelled seven flights.
The company justifies this as follows: in order to improve the efficiency of transportation, some flights are combined together, using one wide-body aircraft instead of two small ones. However, outside commentators interpret the situation differently: it seems that the national carrier does not have enough crews, which is why flights have to be cancelled. If you believe the Telegram channels, the explanation may be something like this:
In turn, commentators explained the flight attendant shortage by the fact that flight attendants have been taking sick leave en masse lately – allegedly, in the last days of June alone, over one and a half thousand people were absent due to illness. Did Aeroflot really have a mass death? No, observers explain, it's just that by law, employees of the transport industry are prohibited from going on strike, and therefore taking sick leave can become a form of protest. Flight attendants have something to protest against, the Telegram channel explains. If you believe it, it is possible that “employees are taking sick leave because of poor treatment from management. Namely, a disgusting schedule, in which there are a lot of “rings” and passenger flights that are not counted in the health standards. As a result, instead of 90 hours, flight attendants can spend 110 hours in the air. And in their free time, they can have technical training, which is not counted in working hours. As a result, it turns out that sometimes crew members simply don’t have days off, and now they don’t seem to be given normal vacations, so they are forced to take sick leave or quit,” the channel writes.
All this could look like slander, but the president of the Sheremetyevo flight crew union told NSN.ru practically the same thing Igor Deldyuzhov. According to him, Aeroflot has introduced additional agreements to employment contracts that allow them to pay less. In particular, the concept of “multi-base” was introduced, in connection with which not only Sheremetyevo, but also about two dozen other airports in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) and abroad can be considered a base and place of work. Thus, a flight, for example, to Antalya, can be considered delivery to the place of work and not counted as working time. It is not surprising that flight attendants, whose salary, despite impressive workloads, seems to barely reach 100 thousand rubles, are unhappy with this policy of savings. In addition, in private conversations, flight attendants talk about significant changes that have made their profession not as attractive as it used to be. For example, now it is no longer possible to fly, as before, to New York or Bali, staying there for a couple of days. And any action, up to posting a photo in the uniform, can become a reason for “deprivation of bonuses”. Advertisements for new flight attendants to work at Aeroflot have now appeared online. The decision to recruit young flight attendants, instead of improving the situation of proven, experienced personnel, is probably being presented to the company's CEO To Sergei Alexandrovsky faithful – they say, you'll see who's boss.
However, it is unlikely to benefit passengers.