With the "strike-breaker" method, Westphalia becomes a hub

All of Germany stands still this Monday. Train stations and airports across the country are firmly in the hands of the pickets. Whole Germany? No. At a small provincial airport in Westphalia there is a lot of activity this Monday. Münster/Osnabrück Airport (FMO) is using a strike day for the fifth time to lure passengers away from the competition.

When the sun rose over the FMO shortly after 7 a.m. on the Monday of the super strike, the provincial airport was already as busy as a bus station. Five large tour buses are parked in front of the main entrance with their engines running. Labels with the flight numbers of low-cost airlines are stuck behind the windshield. A stream of travelers with wheeled suitcases pours out of the terminal building.

One of them is Ramazan Bulut, a concrete worker from Willich-Anrath. His three-hour Sunexpress flight from Samsun on the Black Sea has just landed. “On Sunday I found out from my travel agency that we were going to Münster/Osnabrück instead of Düsseldorf because of the strike,” says the 56-year-old, who now has a two-hour bus ride ahead of him. "I'm glad to be coming home at all today."

For the airport, Bulut is one of over 3500 additional customers being processed at FMO that day. Normally only twelve planes would have landed and taken off here today. Now the airlines are gratefully using the small airport as an alternative airport.

The planned feeder flights to the striked hubs in Munich and Frankfurt are cancelled. But the failures are overcompensated by the 24 additional take-offs and landings that the strike brings to Westphalia. The scoreboard is full as never before. And on it are some destinations that you can't usually fly to from here: Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Fuerteventura, Izmir and Istanbul.

It is the fifth time this year that work has been going on at the FMO while staff at other airports in the region are on warning strikes. "Our people are very pro-airport," says Operations Manager Tjark Giller, explaining his staff's lack of willingness to go on strike.

You have experienced many highs and lows together and see the absence of the others as an opportunity for the location. “On days like this, the team stands together to prove that we can hold our own against the big airports. That is our primary ambition.”

Like many other regional airports, the Westphalian-Lower Saxony joint airport has had to fight for acceptance for years. Passenger numbers have fallen sharply since the turn of the millennium. The publicly owned operating company is making losses.

In the terminal building designed for four million travelers, only 800,000 passengers were lost last year - 700,000 are expected this year. It was only last year that the owners had an independent report checked to see whether the FMO had any future at all. Supposedly he has.

Now the rebellion of the others becomes a great opportunity for the little ones to prove their strengths. The FMO is not the only one to break away from the ranks of the strikers. As the airport association ADV reports on request, 13 German commercial airports are in operation this Monday.

In addition to BER, the "strike breakers" include primarily smaller airports from the second and third tier, which otherwise attract less attention from travelers and now sense their great opportunity: Braunschweig, Weeze, Paderborn. Memmingen, Friedrichshafen, and Karlsruhe. Erfurt, Dresden, Halle/Leipzig. Saarbrücken, Lübeck – and of course Münster.

The scabs do not endear themselves to their union colleagues. But Norbert Heringloh-Poll, chairman of the works council at the FMO, stands by the decision of the employees. Ten days ago, around 92 percent of airport fire service employees decided against a strike in a ballot, reports the employee representative, who also considers the nationwide strike to be "disproportionate". “We are only in the warning strike phase,” he says. "If rounds of negotiations and arbitration fail, we can always go one step further."

Therefore, on the day of the general strike, more work is done at the FMO than ever before. Many are working overtime because of the unusual crowds, and some employees come to work voluntarily on days off. Sandwiches and fruit are distributed for motivation. Even the spokesman helps out at the information desk, makes the announcements and fetches suitcases from the depot. "Something different," he says and grins.

The calculation seems to be working out. At least in the case of a family from Bremen, who is waiting in the terminal building for their Eurowings flight to Palma and enthusiastically looks at the many open check-in counters. "Look at this. No queues!” marvels construction entrepreneur Mirko Rolfes, who actually wanted to fly Ryanair from Bremen this morning with his wife Jeanine and their six-year-old son Oskar. “The flight was canceled on Friday evening. I googled that,” says Rolfes.

And the entrepreneur came across the small airport on the A1 on the Internet, which he "didn't even have on the list" until now, although it is only a good one and a half hours' drive from Bremen. Here the Rolfes found a flight to Mallorca – and at the same time a new favorite airport. "Everything is so relaxed here," says Rolfes. "From now on, our airports are Bremen and Münster/Osnabrück."

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