HAMBURG (Reuters) - Airline executives have committed to providing more aircraft in Germany as part of a raft of measures to avoid backlogs and delays, a spokesman for Germany's transport ministry said on Twitter on Friday.
At a summit in Hamburg, the country's Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer asked airline executives to commit to measures to make air travel more efficient in the wake of travel delays which emerged following the failure of Air Berlin last year.
Lufthansa Chief Executive Carsten Spohr told a news conference the airline would put additional planes and crews on standby. He said Lufthansa has paid out a quarter of a billion euros in compensation due to delays.
Among the two dozen measures agreed in a joint statement were proposals to improve staffing of air traffic control centres, speed up security screening at airports, and inform passengers of delays and cancellations ahead of time.
Airlines will also try and speed up the turnaround times of delayed planes and improve flight plans, the document said.
(Reporting by Jan Schwartz; Writing by Edward Taylor and Caroline Copley; Editing by Maria Sheahan)
