No, clearly the Court was careful not to say that. What it did say, however, is that strikes by the staff of an airline relating to an issue that can arise as a matter of course in the normal running of the business of the carrier does not constitute an extraordinary circumstance and that decisions relating to the restructuring and the reorganisation of the airline must be considered as issues that arise in the normal running of the business. If that is so, then it seems to me difficult to argue that a strike over pay is an extraordinary circumstance. If decisions relating to the restructuring of a business are regarded as ordinary issues arising in the normal running of the business, then this is a fortiori the case of decisions over pay: a restructuring of the business is something that may or may not happen. OTOH, decisions over pay are unavoidable: you cannot run a business without making a decision over what you are going to pay your employees. If decisions over restructuring are inherent to the activity of the carrier, then decisions over pay are even more inherent to that activity since there simply cannot be any running of the business without such decisions being taken.

Now, it is always possible that a later case could take a different line and overrule an earlier judgment, especially as this is a judgment from the 3rd chamber and therefore not endowed with quite the same level of authority as a full court judgment might have. Nonetheless, in the current state of law and until there is a change, I struggle to see how one could reasonably draw any conclusion from this judgment other than that strikes by the staff of an airline over pay (or indeed over any other issue ordinarily arising in the normal course of the business) do not constitute extraordinary circumstances.