Suffering from a sharp drop off in business caused by increased competition in recent years and compounded in the past months by the post-9/11 drop in air travel, Ireland?s state owned air line Aer Lingus has recently laid off almost one third of its workers and cut many of its routes. The company has also attempted to implement a recovery plan including new flight schedules that cut recovery time for pilots between flights---resulting in pilots trade union Impact calling a one-day partial strike for today following the suspension of seven of its members who refused to fly under the new schedule. In response, the company has cancelled all of its flights to four major US airports at least through the weekend---a move condemned by the pilots as a crisis purely of the airline?s own making.
See "Aer Lingus cancels flights from Logan, 3 US airports", Associated Press, The Boston Globe, May 29, 2002