Ready for airport CHAOS

MINNEAPOLIS — As of 7:01 p.m. Pacific time today, Northwest Airlines flight attendants could walk off every odd-numbered flight out of Minneapolis. Or they could pass out pro-labor fliers instead of cold beverages on any random flight out of Detroit.

They could strike a full plane headed to Tokyo or a small connector out of Fargo, N.D.

Or they could continue business as usual until Tuesday, or the next week or well into October.

Anything is possible under CHAOS — Create Havoc Around Our System — a strike strategy trademarked by the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), now looming at Northwest Airlines.

There has been only one CHAOS strike — affecting seven flights at Alaska Airlines in 1993 — but the union credits the threat of one with winning better contracts at about half a dozen other airlines.

In the meantime, Northwest still hopes to block the strike with a ruling in a New York courtroom today.

Strategies for Northwest Airlines passengers

For travelers with tickets on Northwest — which is a major carrier on flights to Asia, Minneapolis and Detroit, including from Sea-Tac Airport, where it also has a popular Seattle-Amsterdam flight — the stoppages could indeed bring chaos. Some strategies:

Get e-mail alerts about work stoppages by signing up on the Association of Flight Attendants Web site, www.nwaafa.org. The union will try to provide some advance information for travelers on disruptions, but passengers still could arrive at the airport and find their flight affected by a last-minute protest.

Doublecheck on the status of your flight before leaving for the airport. Carriers' phone lines have a long wait at the best of times. If a strike begins, the phones could be clogged, so look for updates on the airline's Web site, www.nwa.com

For Sea-Tac departures, a good way to check on flights' status is the real-time arrival/departure information provided by the airport at http://hosting.portseattle.org/fids/

Other airlines will usually accommodate travelers with Northwest tickets, but it could be a long wait since many airlines are flying almost full. Do some advance research on other airlines' schedules so you know which flights to pursue for a seat.

Source: Seattle Times travel staff

The airline says it is prepared to keep flying its regular schedule after today, although it's not releasing specific plans.

At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Northwest is the fifth-busiest domestic carrier and the third-busiest for foreign travel, with popular routes to Asia and Amsterdam, and a major carrier on flights to Minneapolis and Detroit.

The airline carried more than 1 million domestic passengers flying through Sea-Tac from January to July, for a 6.4 percent market share, and more than 13 percent of the international travelers.

As Northwest goes to court today, it has picked up some powerful allies.

The U.S. Justice Department and the Air Transport Association, which represents more than 20 U.S. airlines, filed friend-of-the-court briefs Wednesday in support of Northwest's motion to bar a strike by flight attendants.

Depending on what happens in court, Northwest travelers soon could learn what the union will do — and how its strategy will play out at an airline that is bankrupt, among flight attendants who feel they have little left to lose, and with a flying public tense after the alleged London terror plot.

The AFA called the strike in hope of renegotiating an imposed contract that cut Northwest attendants' pay and benefits about 40 percent.

CHAOS helped win raises and preserve insurance and retirement benefits at carriers including US Airways, America West and Midwest Airlines, according to AFA spokesman Ricky Thornton.

A worried AirTran went so far as to remove some seats from planes so it could legally fly with a smaller crew, he said.

The power of CHAOS is the suspense, Thornton said. Also, it lets attendants continue to work and get paid through the process.

"And, as a traditional strike goes on and on, it becomes less and less effective," Thornton said. "With CHAOS, you don't lose effectiveness after the Day One staging."

However, both Alaska Airlines and Midwest Airlines denied that CHAOS influenced their contracts.

"That's definitely not our interpretation of what happened," Midwest spokeswoman Carol Skornicka said.

Airline consultant Jerry Glass also sees the CHAOS impact as minimal.

Of the Alaska Airlines planes, "six had delays of 30 to 90 minutes and the seventh was canceled — and that's it," said Glass, president of F&H Solutions Group in Washington, D.C., and a former US Airways executive vice president.

Airlines train managers and other staff and spread them across the routes so that they could step in to replace striking attendants, he said.

Travel consultant Joe Brancatelli thinks CHAOS did force concessions from Alaska Airlines, but for the same reasons he believes it won't work at Northwest.

"It was run by people who had cultivated a reputation for exquisitely good customer service, and [it was] when times were good," Brancatelli said of the Alaska strike.

Northwest, on the other hand, is in bankruptcy court.

Also, a limited action such as CHAOS won't stir up enough customer problems to worry Northwest, Brancatelli said.

"Northwest proved they don't care about customer inconvenience last year during the mechanics' strike," said Brancatelli, who has been advising his clients to book away ever since.

"This is not an airline that will respond to [CHAOS], in my opinion."

To go for maximum effect, he believes the union should target routes where Northwest has competition, or perhaps shut down the entire Minneapolis hub.

Information about Northwest's Sea-Tac presence provided by Seattle Times travel and business staff.