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Northwest Airlines, which canceled thousands of summer flights primarily because of a pilot staffing shortage, said Thursday that it will have enough pilots to fly its entire schedule over the heavy Thanksgiving and Christmas travel periods.

Tim Rainey, Northwest's senior vice president of flight operations, said, "We have sufficient additional aircraft and crews to meet the needs of our operations."

Between August and December, Rainey said that Northwest is adding 110 pilots to its flying schedule.

Also, Northwest has increased the number of pilots on reserve, or on call, by about 30 percent.

"I am confident that we are staffed going into this holiday period as well as the airline has ever been staffed," Rainey said in an interview.

Northwest typically offers consumers more flights in the summer than it does during the fall and winter. So pilots fly fewer flights in November and December than in the summer months.

However, the airline has cut its flight capacity well beyond its normal seasonal reduction. In the fourth quarter, the number of seats that Northwest is offering on domestic flights is down 6 to 7 percent compared with 2006.

Monty Montgomery, a spokesman for the Northwest pilots union, agrees that the carrier will have enough pilots to operate its full holiday flight schedule. But by assigning such a high number of reserves, Northwest has put added stress on pilots, he said. Reserves won't have definitive holiday schedules and are expected to be "available to fly at almost any time," he said.

After Northwest canceled 12 percent of flights in late June and about 8 percent in late July, it reached agreement in August on contract improvements with the Northwest branch of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA).

During the summer, Northwest had seen a spike in pilot sick calls. In addition, the shortage was exacerbated as some pilots hit contractual limits on the hours they could fly. So the carrier agreed to pay pilots overtime for flying more than 80 hours per month. Also, the carrier stopped scheduling pilots to fly 88 to 90 hours a month on domestic flights, a schedule Rainey called "not a sustainable deal."

For the holidays, Rainey said the airline has increased the number of "spare planes" in the system, from 10 to between 16 and 18, so it has more aircraft available when there are disruptions.

Also in August, Northwest created an incentive program to encourage employee attendance; it ended up paying $12 million in attendance bonuses.

Rainey said Northwest will offer a similar program in December and early January.

ALPA's Montgomery said the incentive is a maximum of $1,000 per employee, but his union's leadership views it as a contract violation. "They are trying to bypass our right to bargain as highly skilled professionals," Montgomery said. The union wants to negotiate all compensation.

Rainey urged holiday travelers to provide current contact information at NWA.com so the carrier can assist passengers with rebooking in the event of weather problems.

Liz Fedor • 612-673-7709

Liz Fedor • lfedor@startribune.com