00:00So far, we haven't had any reports of major disruptions to flights in and out of Australia's
00:08biggest capital city airports. As you mentioned there, this is set to be one of the busiest
00:15days at Australian airports since before the pandemic. We have hearing reports from some
00:21airports that there's been some cancelled flights this morning. However, it's unclear
00:25if that is related to the strikes. I'm hearing that potentially, if there is disruptions,
00:32they wouldn't be until this afternoon. However, if there are disruptions due to these flights,
00:38due to the strikes of the engineers, it could result in chaos due to how busy the airports
00:43are. We're hearing that some flights simply have no spare seats on them. So if one plane
00:49ends up grounded due to these strikes, then that could mean that there's simply nowhere
00:54else for passengers to fly. We have around 500 workers striking today for 24 hours. They
01:02are the sorts of engineers that work on planes that specifically do things like tow them
01:07back from the terminal. And the reason why this could result in issues with the airports
01:13and flights today is if we have one plane that could have an issue, there simply won't
01:18be enough workers around to tow it back from the terminals to replace it with another one.
01:23The unions representing these engineers and Qantas have been in dispute since around the
01:29middle of this year when their latest enterprise bargaining agreement expired. They already
01:35went on strike back in October, and their union says that now, after failing to reach
01:40a deal on better pay and conditions with the airline, that they've decided to strike again
01:45now for 24 hours. The airline, however, says that they think that they are giving a fair
01:51deal to these workers, that they're working on negotiations, and they say that they've
01:54put contingencies in place today so that there isn't disruptions to passengers.
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