pilots’ strike that threatened to upend Canadians’ Victoria Day long weekend travel plans.The Calgary-based airline and the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) announced a tentative agreement to avoid the job action early Friday.
Some 1,800 pilots at WestJet and Swoop had been poised to walk off the job Friday morning after the ALPA served a strike notice Monday.In anticipation of a work stoppage, WestJet grounded more than 200 flights Thursday and Friday to avoid “abandoning aircraft in remote locations without support.” The process of getting those flights back online started after the tentative agreement was reached, WestJet said.“The WestJet Group is ramping up its operations as quickly and efficiently as possible, however the full resumption of operations will take time,” the airline said in a statement.“Guests remain encouraged to continue to check the status of their flights before heading to the airport.”WestJet’s cancellations affected dozens of routes within Canada and to the U.S.
and overseas, while flights at the WestJet Encore regional service and the WestJet-owned Sunwing Airlines were unaffected.The airline cancelled 111 flights on Thursday and 107 on Friday, according to tracking service FlightAware.
Those figures represented 30 per cent of WestJet flights scheduled each day.Duncan Dee, a former chief operating officer at Air Canada, told Global News it will likely be until mid-next-week before WestJet is back operating at 100 per cent capacity.“What’s happened over the last few days, you should look at it in terms of a giant jigsaw puzzle, which was already well put together and then WestJet comes in and they have to take each and every piece of that jigsaw puzzle apart,” he said.“They now have a bunch of.