Our flagship airline appears to have its flag at very best half mast

Our flagship airline appears to have its flag at the very best half mast and maybe even worse.

I spent a career as a duty officer at the airport for a ground handling agency for 30 years and have never witnessed in all that time the number of delays and cancelled flights that we are confronted with currently. I would like to ask the following questions to the CEO and hope I don’t get an Aurigny ‘decline to comment’ response.

As we approach the end of May and our tourism season kicks in with inflated fares and all this disruption for our travellers can we please have some answers to the following:

n How many Aurigny services were delayed or cancelled during the month of April and the beginning of May?

n How many of the delayed flights landed after official airfield closing time and what has this cost Aurigny to keep the airfield open and staffed?

n How many aircraft have been wet leased by Aurigny and what has been the cost to the airline?

Maybe Aurigny should look at its services with the fleet they have and maybe a touch of pruning would not go amiss on some routes, which has been unsuccessful in the past years?

Surely the local travellers and holidaymakers should and would expect a much better service or is it time to get competition for Aurigny?

This really must be sorted soon or we will have no tourists at all and you will end up losing staff because of the unsociable hours currently being worked.

NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED

A spokesman from Aurigny responds:

Aurigny sincerely regrets the adverse impact on passengers and the island community due to recent reliability challenges. These arose from several technical failures affecting the Embraer aircraft and our ATR fleet, resulting in our capacity levels today being approximately 25% lower than earlier this year.

We have responded to these challenges by engaging with wet-lease, or ACMI (Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance, and Insurance), capacity providers, which saw our capacity restored to the required levels in April. During this month, Aurigny’s UK service reliability was restored. The airline operated to a punctuality rate of 76% – on par with the average for UK carriers, and it reached 85% for the seven days preceding the grounding of a Luxwing aircraft on 23 April 2024. Forty-three flight sectors were cancelled during April, representing 4.7% of Aurigny’s UK flights for this month, with most of these cancellations occurring after the grounding of Luxwing.

Given the impact of the Luxwing grounding serving to reduce Aurigny’s capacity by a quarter, Aurigny has been making significant efforts to try and mitigate this impact. One of these measures includes operating to extended operating hours and delaying flights rather than reverting to cancellation. We are very grateful to Guernsey Airport, who granted airport extensions, ranging between five minutes and two and a half hours, for 18 days during April. This is a service for which Guernsey Airport charges Aurigny in accordance with their published tariffs.

Regarding wet lease services, Aurigny has used the services of six different ACMI providers this year. Some supply arrangements have been for ad hoc flights, and others, such as AvantiAir, for extended periods. Carriers regularly use ACMI capacity in events where their own capacity is unavailable due to planned or unforeseen circumstances or when demand necessitates additional capacity on a short-term basis – more than 8,000 ACMI flights were flown globally during the first week of May. The benefits of ACMI are that the carriers receiving the service do not need to train their own crews to operate or maintain the specific aircraft. Costs are only incurred for actual flights delivered in this manner. Regarding the cost of ACMI arrangements, while individual contracts are subject to commercial confidentiality, Aurigny will disclose the total ACMI cost incurred this year within its audited annual financial statements. It should be noted that, after safety, Aurigny is prioritising service reliability above its financial objectives at present.

The routes Aurigny introduced this year are not the cause for the reliability challenges that the airline currently faces – Aurigny’s available capacity has been constrained by unforeseeable technical events that have resulted in extended periods of non-availability of parts of Aurigny’s fleet, compounded by service failures from two ACMI providers. Aurigny’s schedule for 2024 was designed based on its available aircraft capacity before these unforeseeable events, and routes such as Paris and London City Airport have been very well received. Aurigny has tried not to cancel flights and is sourcing further ACMI capacity to bridge the introduction of two further leased aircraft that will join Aurigny’s fleet in July and September of this year. Should this ACMI capacity not be secured in the coming weeks, Aurigny will have no choice but to reduce its operating schedule until its capacity has been restored to full strength.