Comair to lay off 7 employees at BIA

BANGOR – One-third of the Comair employees at Bangor International Airport will be without a job starting May 13 as the airline trims its work force because of a pilots’ strike.

Comair, based at the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Airport in Hebron, Ky., announced Friday that 2,000 of its employees systemwide will be given pink slips because of the financial strain the strike has had on its operations. In Bangor, that means seven of the 20 employees.

Comair does not have a list of where the job cuts will occur, said spokesman Elizabeth Cannon on Monday.

“I don’t have a specific breakdown of individual cities,” she said. “Of the 2,000 positions that were eliminated, 75 percent were in Cincinnati, 15 percent in Florida and 10 percent were elsewhere.”

However, one employee at BIA, who did not want to be identified because Comair has told its employees not to speak to the media, said Monday morning that he will be laid off in two weeks. Others in the travel industry in Bangor who talk to Comair employees on a regular basis confirm the loss of seven jobs.

The Bangor employee is nervous, and said he is hoping the strike is resolved soon. Then, he said, he expects to get his job back.

Comair on Monday canceled flights through May 29. If the strike were to be resolved this week, it still would take several weeks for flights to start up again, Cannon said.

The future of Comair at Bangor International Airport is unknown. Workers face layoffs and hope they will be rehired once the strike is over. Travelers are scrambling to rebook flights or are making future travel plans on competing airlines.

At Comair’s corporate office, officials have released statements saying strike talks are ongoing after having resumed last Wednesday, but they won’t discuss how much progress has been made between the airline and the pilots’ union. On April 16, the company started taking steps to “reduce the size of the airline and preserve its financial viability once the work stoppage concludes,” according to a statement.

Those steps included reducing the Comair fleet from 119 to 102 aircrafts, removing eight regional jets from its fleet, indefinitely deferring all future aircraft deliveries, and cutting future flight schedules. But the airline won’t discuss where the changes will be made.

“It’s a pain in the neck is what it amounts to,” said Mimi Massucco, a travel agent with Hurley Travel Services in Mount Desert. “The thing that suffers is [BIA] because they’re a major carrier. That’s all we get from Delta – they’re still talking. Yeah, well, what are they talking about?”

Before the strike BIA administrators planning to attend a meeting with Delta Air Lines, the parent company of Comair, had hoped to convince Delta officials to add a fourth flight between Bangor and Cincinnati. But at the scheduled meeting which was held less than two weeks ago, the Comair strike and its effects on the airport took precedence.

Rebecca Hupp, acting executive director at BIA, was scheduled to fly Comair from Bangor to Cincinnati with a connection to Atlanta for the meeting with Delta officials. Instead, she had to use different combinations of US Airways, Delta and American Eagle from Bangor to Boston to Atlanta and back.

Hupp said Delta officials should not be cutting flights from Bangor once the strike is over because of the high number of travelers filling the seats. But Delta also would not commit to a fourth flight, she said, because it does not know whether planes will be available to use or whether they can land them at congested hubs, which are connection airports.

Travel agents, in the meantime, have been calling their customers with scheduled Comair flights to rebook them on other airlines. The travel agents also are not scheduling their clients on Comair through June.

The rescheduling of Comair flights has customers angry, said Cindy Hardy, president of Bangor Travel Services. Many don’t want to fly through Boston, want few connecting flights, and want to be on a jet instead of a turboprop. To get some of what they want, the travelers have to drive to Portland.

“Unfortunately, in a strike situation, you don’t have many options,” Hardy said. “There’s quite a few people who don’t like any of the options, and the more they stomp their feet they think their options are going to change. They’re not. They’re on strike.”

Addy Dubois, who works at Eastern Maine Medical Center and acts as a liaison between Eastern Maine Healthcare Alliance and Bangor Travel Services, has had to reschedule a number of EMHA business trips. She also had to rearrange the travel plans of her parents, Catherine and Nunzio Tripaldi of Florida, who are flying to Bangor in May to attend the college graduation ceremonies of Derek Dubois, Addy Dubois’ son.

She said she didn’t want her parents to fly through Boston because it’s too busy and flights repeatedly are canceled there. Her parents, too, wanted to travel on a jet. That didn’t leave many options.

Dubois will be driving to Portland to pick up her parents and will lose a day of work to do so.

Dubois blames both the pilots and the airlines for the inconvenience. Mainly the airlines.

“Customer service doesn’t exist in the airlines anymore,” she said. “You travel and it’s at their mercy.”