Air Canada expects most of its domestic and international routes to be back up and running Thursday after resuming operations Tuesday following the conclusion of a strike by its flight attendants.
An online dashboard tracking Air Canada's service resumption said Thursday morning that 98 per cent of domestic flights were expected to operate over the next 24 hours, along with 99 per cent of U.S. flights.
The airline's ramp-up of international flights has also nearly caught up, with 94 per cent of planned flights expected to operate.
Air Canada chief operations officer Mark Nasr said earlier this week that the restart process would take longer for international routes because the airline brought crews home before the strike.
That means that when the strike ended, crews weren't in position overseas to staff return flights back to Canada.
It is expected to take up to 10 days for service to return to normal levels across Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge.
On Wednesday, the company said it was adopting a policy to reimburse certain customers if they booked alternative transportation in lieu of cancelled flights between Aug. 15 and Aug. 23.
The airline and the union representing more than 10,000 of its flight attendants struck a new tentative agreement on Tuesday morning with the help of a federal mediator.
The proposed deal must still be ratified by the flight attendants, with a vote scheduled to take place from Aug. 27 to Sept. 6.
Terms of the tentative deal shared by the Air Canada component of the Canadian Union of Public Employees on its website include a 12 per cent salary increase this year for most junior flight attendants, while more senior members are set for an eight per cent pay bump.
All members are set for a three per cent raise in 2026, followed by 2.5 per cent in 2027 and 2.75 per cent in 2028.
The tentative agreement, which would run until March 2029, also addresses the contentious issue of unpaid work while airplanes are not in the air.
Starting this year, flight attendants would receive half their hourly wage rate for 60 minutes of ground time on narrow-body aircraft and 70 minutes on wide-body planes.
That would rise to 60 of the hourly wage rate next April, 65 per cent in 2027 and 70 per cent in 2028.
Picture Courtesy: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi
