Experts back Aurigny’s 2025 plans

They said they generally had ‘a positive overview of the forward outlook for 2025’ and found that changes to schedules released today should improve the airline’s reliability.

However, they warned that Aurigny’s recovery after a torrid 12 months was dependent on improving its retention of pilots.

The inquiry was carried out by a former British Airways chief pilot, Douglas Brown, and an ex-finance director of a European airline, Mark Elliott. They published their findings this morning.

‘The schedule that has been put forward would appear to have more resilience for this winter and especially for the summer season of 2025,’ they said.

‘The plan going forward would appear to be robust and flyable, but our overriding concern remains a shortfall of pilots.

‘Aurigny will need to ensure it takes extraordinary measures to secure and retain qualified flight crew to operate the aircraft for the summer season of 2025.’

They said virtually every UK airline was suffering crew shortfalls as pilots moved to larger aircraft.

They identified ongoing supply problems with equipment for Aurigny’s ATR aircraft as a second risk beyond the airline’s control and encouraged management to take advantage of any rare opportunities to buy critical spare parts as a preventative measure.

The inquiry, set up by Aurigny’s shareholder, the States’ Trading Supervisory Board, also looked into the reasons for the airline’s repeated service disruptions between February and August 2024 and how it responded to them.

It found that Aurigny’s summer 2024 schedule ‘potentially pushed the capacity of the fleet to its limit’ and identified that the airline operated with ‘a culture which might, on occasion, err on the side of optimism’.

However, it concluded that most of the catalogue of problems which disrupted passengers earlier this year were largely beyond the control of the airline’s managers, who were cleared of negligence or gross misjudgement.

‘The airline was struck with a series of significant events that were quite unfortunate but not reasonably foreseeable.

‘Aurigny was let down by the suppliers of ACMI [aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance] lease capacity, required because of the late delivery of its own aircraft.

‘There were three unconnected maintenance events which compounded Aurigny’s difficulties. These were completely unrelated and impossible to foresee. Each was handled as effectively as could be expected in the circumstances.’

Aurigny faced additional criticism during the period of disruption for withdrawing the only jet in its fleet, which had flown routes to the UK and Europe for the past 10 years.

But the reviewers leading the inquiry strongly backed the decision to sell the Embraer.

‘We believe the exit from the aircraft was the right decision and if it had been kept in the fleet the situation might have been even worse than what was experienced,’ they said.