Air Canada began grounding flights on Thursday in advance of a potential strike by its 10,000 flight attendants this weekend.
While the immediate effect of the cancellations was limited, a complete shutdown of the airline would bring travel chaos to a country where vast distances leave few practical alternatives to flying. It would also disrupt a sizable chunk of international travel to or from the country.
Mark Nasr, the company’s chief operations officer, told reporters on Thursday that “several dozen” flights to overseas destinations scheduled for that evening had been canceled. The cancellations will be scaled up leading to a total shutdown of flights operated directly by the company by early Saturday morning, which would ground about 130,000 travelers a day.
“The impact that this is going to have on our customers is profound,” Mr. Nasr said at a news conference in Montreal. “It’s simply not the kind of system that we can start or stop at the push of a button. So in order to have a safe and orderly wind down, we need to begin now.”
Both Air Canada and the flight attendants’ union have filed notices setting up the shutdown for just after midnight on Saturday morning: The union’s said that it intended to strike, and the company’s that it would lock out employees. Those steps followed apparently acrimonious negotiations that Air Canada unsuccessfully tried to resolve through government arbitration. The flight attendants are seeking improved wages and compensation for work they do before flights take off and after they land.
Air Canada is the dominant carrier in Canada and offers about 48 percent of available seat miles, the industry standard for measuring capacity, on domestic routes according to Cirium, an aviation data firm. Unlike its three major Canadian competitors, Air Canada has a wide network of international flights that reaches 65 countries.
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