The airline confirmed late on Friday that it was working alongside the authorities over flight GR101P, which was being flown by the ATR72 G-OGFC, which had been out of service and stuck at Gatwick Airport since the previous Thursday, when it had suffered a technical issue. It was a positioning flight to return the aircraft to the island, and therefore had no passengers on board.
The flight landed safely at Guernsey Airport without incident, and Aurigny added, ‘most importantly, all of our team are safe and well’. Industry sources have hinted at reports of a possible loss of power on the landing approach, but these have not been confirmed.
The flight left Gatwick at 3.19pm and arrived into Guernsey at 4.07pm.
‘The affected aircraft was immediately removed from our operations and remains so until it can be returned to service. Aurigny is unable to comment further during what is an ongoing investigation, so as not to prejudice the outcome,’ the airline said.
It had ‘made the appropriate provisions’ to support its ongoing operations, it said, and disruption over the weekend was modest, and mostly weather-related in the islands yesterday.
G-OGFC experienced a parts failure on arrival at Gatwick on the evening of Thursday 29 January. Aurigny said that the component involved was not one typically retained in an airline’s spares pool, as its failure rate is very low.
Last weekend the airline said that it had expected that the plane would return to service on Wednesday, when the positioning flight took place.
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