First Arriva on its first day of operations. Now Air Malta.

What do you call it when 17 pilots claim sick on the same day? As did one half of the Arriva drivers on the first day.

It looks like a strike, it sounds like a strike, what else do you need to call it a strike? The pilots’ association said it did not order one, that is if it can order a strike, but it has been defending the pilots and blasting the airline all over the place.

The end result is that for a day total chaos triumphed at the airport, more than 2,000 persons lost their flight or had to reschedule them and people were left stranded either in Malta or at foreign airports waiting in vain for the planes that fly the Malta colours.

The damage to Malta’s image was so great that it took a wag just a short time to speculate that the pilots went for a BBQ the previous night and all suffered from food poisoning. It would be interesting if the doctors who went to see the sick pilots were to give us an analysis of what the pilots were suffering from.

Of course, there have been strikes in the airline industry almost as long as there has been an airline industry itself. But strikes in this sector in Malta are very rare. One remembers the strike in chairman Joe Tabone’s time when Mr Tabone gave out an ultimatum that unless the strike was called off by midnight, he would close down the airline. He was later overruled by Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami.

The contemporary management of the airline has rebranded the airline as offering a taste of Malta before one has actually arrived here. In this case, the taste of Malta that the tourist got on Monday was of a country that welcomes its guests with a strike with all the unpleasant consequences of one.

The airline finds itself in a rather awkward position: its present management was brought in by the previous government as part of its restructuring effort of the national airline and it is looked upon with slightly suspicious eyes, going by dark words uttered by Prime Minister Muscat some time ago. Can this explain the less that strenuous condemnation of the strike that was not a strike by government authorities? Any other airline would have reacted very differently. Can you imagine Ryanair or easyJet taking it so softly?

This has been a one-off and it would be unwise to take it much further but clearly the pilots seem to have a lot of grievances and anger. They may be among the highest paid persons in Malta but no doubt their opinions are coloured by the much higher packages they can get elsewhere. All through the airline’s difficult process to be dragged back from the edge of the abyss, they and their association have always been in the public eye criticisng the airline and its management for all they were worth.

Even now, while insisting it did not call a strike and that the absence of 17 pilots on sick leave was not a strike (our paper yesterday explained this beat all mathematical possibilities ranging between one in 5.9 million to one in 210 billion) still claimed it’s the management’s fault, much as it has long been claiming.

Yes, it is management’s fault: so far as the general public the much-maligned management has been unable to conclude its investigations as to why a plane delayed its departure in Milan because of some people being late.