Yet more problems on today’s early morning inter-Island flights

Wednesday 27 July 2016

Less than 24 hours after apologising to the flying public for an “unprecedented” number of delays and cancellations over the past few months, and promising to do better, Blue Islands were forced to cancel this morning’s premier inter-Island flight.

The Jersey/Guernsey service is operated by Blue Islands, but with bookings taken by Flybe. The 08:10 Jersey to Guernsey never happened and was simply listed as “non operational.” It’s left fliers fuming. Anyone wanting to get to Guernsey by air today wouldn't have been able to arrive until around 10:30.

Politicians are so angry with the airline they’ve demanded an emergency meeting to find out what's going on. But so far, Senator Lyndon Farnham has had no confirmation as to when that might happen. He wanted it this week, or next at the latest.

It's also difficult to know what control Senator Farnham has over the route, given that the Island has an 'open-skies' policy, and there is no service level agreement in place on which to hold airlines to account. 

Yesterday the Managing Director of Blue Islands Rob Veron blamed a combination of fog, being let down by an aircraft lessor, and unforeseen technical issues, for causing the problems. There’s been no comment from him or the airline so far this morning, aside from to repeat yesterday's media statement. 

In that statement, which came before today's cancellation, Mr Veron said: “We are taking robust measures to mitigate against the risk of any future occurrences. We wish to apologise to all affected passengers and assure all stakeholders of our utmost attention in returning to levels of on time performance we all reasonably expect.”