Air France pilots are said to be increasingly victims of “chronic fatigue”. “Faced with an ambitious recovery program, despite several sectors understaffed, the staff must cope with minimum rest and worrying chronic fatigue,” Alexandre Rio, president of Alter, a representative union, told AFP on Wednesday. Air France and Transavia pilots.
The pilots’ union, which has challenged the government on several occasions, believes that “certain limits are today objectives” in terms of the number of hours worked and that the company uses “anxiogenic communication and managerial violence, very complicated to live with. for employees”. According to Alter, “10% of Air France pilots declare themselves to be in a state of depression”.
The union denounces more generally “the unrealistic ambition of yield” up to 10% of the general manager Ben Smith, a performance “never achieved before” while a crying lack of pilots, hostesses, agents at the floor and mechanics should be noted.
Some aspects of Air France policy criticized
Alter also denounces certain aspects of Air France’s policy, in particular on the reorganization of take-off slots or the group’s positioning in terms of energy efficiency, which it considers insufficient. Alexandre Rio mentions that his union had called for a strike at the end of June to “denounce these excesses”, “in the face of an imminent danger for flight safety”, but regrets not having received any response from the Minister Delegate for Transport Clément Beaune since .
For its part, Air France “recalls that the safety of flights, its customers and its crews is its absolute priority” and that it is “above the standards set by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA ) in terms of rest time after a flight”.
The company also clarified to AFP that “700 pilots will have been recruited between April 2021 and December 2022”, allowing it to have “numbers of trained staff to support the resumption of traffic and correspond to the ambitious program set for the next month “.