Gol and Azul receive authorization from Anac to reduce flight attendants

Anac (National Civil Aviation Agency) authorized this Monday (17) that Gol and Azul reduce the number of flight attendants on board because of the new wave of flight cancellations – the high number of professionals in quarantine has harmed the airline operations.

Latam has already filed a similar request with the agency and is awaiting a response. According to a note from Anac, the ordinance will be published this week in the Federal Official Gazette and the authorization will be valid until March 13 for Azul, March 14 for Gol and March 17 for Latam.

Normally, Anac’s rule requires two flight attendants for planes with more than 100 seats plus one for each group of 50 passengers or fraction thereof. The protocol used now calculates the number of flight attendants according to passengers. A plane with 186 passengers will be able to fly with three professionals.

“The Agency emphasizes that it has been studying measures in the regulatory sphere with the objective of minimizing impacts on the air network due to the increase in cases caused by respiratory diseases, which have caused the removal of professionals who work in the sector”, says Anac.

In a statement, Gol says it will keep four professionals on flights made by Boeing 737-800 and 737 MAX 8 aircraft, which carry 186 passengers.

“The reduction to three flight attendants will only be done in cases of extreme need for flights with a maximum of 150 passengers”, he says.

Azul says that the measure is “another instrument to aid air operations”. “However, Azul emphasizes that it will only use this authorization in cases of extreme need to ensure the fulfillment of its operations, without prejudice to flight safety”, the company says in a statement.

Until the beginning of last week, Azul and Latam had 630 canceled flights. Azul stated that the average impact was 10% of its flights on the day, about 90 of them.

The wave of cancellations started late last year. Earlier this year, more than 4,000 flights were cancelled, about half of them in the United States, due to bad weather and an increase in cases of the disease caused by the omicron variant.