Richard Digard: Aurigny’s connectivity conundrum

Alderney’s anxiety over Guernsey’s unilateral slashing of its travel subsidy and its knee-jerk reaction of racing off to Whitehall brandishing a faded copy of a 1948 post-war support agreement while crying foul shows us two things.

The first is Alderney’s love of cake-ism. By that I mean its insistence that it is an independent community with its own government, but totally dependent on its larger – but equally cash-strapped – neighbour 21 miles to the south.

The second, and far more significant for consideration today, is the essentiality of adequate and affordable transport links for remote island communities like the two CI bailiwicks. High fares and unreliable services plague this island and damage its economy, just like Alderney – but no one is petitioning the Ministry of Justice on behalf of Guernsey residents who receive no air fare subsidy at all.

Alderney’s view is that the £2m.-plus cost of Aurigny providing air links there cannot possibly be reduced unless significant airport improvements are made, also at Guernsey’s multi-million expense.

In contrast, the authorities here insist that a short runway and a struggling airline is all that Guernsey needs to remain connected with the outside world.

This contradictory approach certainly appeared to get a boost the other week when the States' Trading Supervisory Board released its Aurigny Air Services Review by PA Consulting into whether its network and fleet configuration will provide the necessary levels of reliability and resilience required by the island.

The answer – no prizes for guessing – was yes. But read the report attentively and the two authors, a highly experienced pilot and a top-flight accountant, effectively set out in detail why the island’s own airline is virtually guaranteed to fail.

The first reason is that pilots don’t really want to fly its planes because they’re not jets. The second is that Aurigny’s choice of aircraft, the ATR, is inherently unreliable because of the issue of getting spares. The third is that Guernsey’s airport often operates against Aurigny’s needs and those of its passengers.

This means that the STSB, an expensive quasi-regulator that’s supposed to look after your best interests as notional owner of government assets, hasn’t been doing its job properly. As the report notes, ‘Late fees presently being charged have transferred a significant amount of revenue to the airport at the airline’s expense…’ Yes, your sky-high fares help subsidise an inefficient airport.

Bearing in mind that this report will have gone through a number of sanitising drafts (‘fact checking’) and studiously tries to avoid criticising anyone, it is surprisingly blunt about the baked-in problems facing Guernsey’s national carrier.

‘In conducting this study, we uncovered certain situations and practices that we found unusual.’ This included airport officials claiming things that the reviewers found hard to accept at face value and restrictions on the opening hours of the airport that were almost guaranteed to make passengers’ and Aurigny’s life harder.

Fundamentally, however, the problem for us all is why would you work for Aurigny? No pilots, no crew, no airline. It’s as simple as that. Some 40% of all pilots walked away in 2023/4 alone and 16 in the 12 months to this August.

Why wouldn’t they? As a pilot you can earn far more money flying a jet than an ATR and starting salaries here are low compared to other airlines. Plus the high cost and shortage of housing and the challenges surrounding commuting from the UK discourage many potential recruits.

The airline hires co-pilots with the minimum commercial experience it’s allowed to. Yet as soon as they clock up an extra 250 flying hours they’re eligible to fly for British Airways on a starting salary of around £65,000 – fully £25,000 more than they’re offered here. Yes, Aurigny effectively incubates pilots for other airlines.

There are similar issues for cabin crew. Those from the UK are treated as second-class citizens by the island’s immigration laws – ‘must stay in lodgings and are not allowed to rent or buy’ – so working here is not an attractive prospect.

Staffing alone is existential for Aurigny. As the reviewers say, ‘[The airline] will need to… take extraordinary (my emphasis) measures to secure and retain qualified flight crew to operate the aircraft schedule being published.’ In other words, those services are far from guaranteed.

Similarly with aircraft. These suffer from poor communications equipment and issues with spares. Despite nose landing gear being a known weak spot for ATRs, these are in very short supply. Repairs are another issue. Normal overhauls take 45 days – now out to 90-120 days. But as the report notes, that only reflects how long it will be in the repair shop, not the wait to get it there.

Oh, and there’s this: ‘There is a worldwide shortage of ATR aircraft and particularly the type that is compatible with the rest of the Aurigny fleet…’

PA Consulting also observes how Guernsey’s inadequate runway impacts Aurigny’s existing operations like Palma or Ibiza. ‘Engineers were originally carried on some of these flights but are no longer due to payload restrictions. Should an aircraft be grounded at one of these destinations, the recovery process could be time-consuming and complex.’

What surprised me is that Aurigny isn’t really run from Guernsey anyway. Its operations control centre is outsourced to Air Partner Ltd near Gatwick, which actually specialises in handling executive and business aviation jets, not passenger services.

That, too, was down to staffing issues. Although it is successful, crew rostering is handled from there as

well, but without any formal deputy cover for the head of ops, ‘which presents a significant risk if he becomes unavailable’.

There’s much more, but the takeaway from the report is Aurigny is doing a valiant job trying to keep the plates spinning but in a context where so much is running against it.

That’s not just aircraft and pilots but even something as fundamental as the airport not opening at sensible times or allowing Aurigny to move aircraft even when the engines aren’t running.

It’s why the reviewers suggest STSB gets regulator, airport and airline in a room to bang heads together and sort out for the benefit of island and customers some of the restrictive and unhelpful situations and practices they uncovered.

When it comes to sea links, Guernsey appears to have secured lifeline ferry services to the island through a properly followed and robust tendering process, despite the difficulties posed by Jersey.

What PA Consulting’s report tells us about Aurigny, however, is that the island’s airline and the lifeline links it provides can no longer be taken for granted to provide the connectivity that we need.

Part of the reason for that is due to Alderney itself. As the report notes, servicing the island with Dorniers accounts for 12% of Aurigny’s available seat kilometres (ASKs) while consuming a far greater share of management’s time. ‘This detracts from the ATR operation.’

Oddly, given the row over Guernsey funding, there is a cheaper alternative on the table from the Alderney Air Transport Group that would also free up Aurigny and spare the need for a runway extension in Alderney, but which doesn’t seem to have been considered.

So what the PA report actually does, in a measured and considered way, is to highlight the inherent fragility of the island’s lifeline air links. That may not be anyone’s explicit fault, but the clear message is that those links need a top-to-bottom review before the next inevitable crisis occurs.