Flying obscure charters in Europe
With the grounding of the 737 Max, obscure ACMI charter airlines in Europe are presumably finding that for summer 2019, business has never been better while holiday companies and certain airlines find themselves short of lift
The spotter in me would like to find a way of flying on these obscure ACMI airlines by design at modest cost rather than by accident - i.e. buying a ticket more than a few days in advance knowing with high probability that it'll be an obscure charter carrier, not just spending a day waiting around at Palma de Mallorca and buying an expensive last minute ticket in the hope that FR24 shows something unusual will turn up in 2 hours time. Airline employees in peak season have better things to do with their time than have some crazy deranged spotter pestering them for details of which flight a certain reg is planned to operate :-)
I've made use of airfleets.net / planespotters.net to get registration details of airlines in question, had a look through FR24 to see where these aircraft have flown in the last few weeks, and then tried to make dummy bookings in the hope that there will be the desired "operated by XXX airline" message but this doesn't always work - unless one is willing to spend big quantities of money to buy a ticket with just a few days notice. Anything involving flights outside Europe (plus Turkey and Morocco) is a no-no because of either safety or too far from home
Beyond airlines,net and ch-aviation, are there any other websites where planned use of obscure airlines in advance is discussed or info might be available with a fairly good signal:noise ratio ?
Amongst others, I'm particularly interested in Fly2Sky, Cobrex, ALK, Jonika, Wamos, HiFly (not HiFly Malta), Air X, Air X Germany, Maleth, Freebird Europe and Smartlynx Europe
Any advice would be much appreciated
Last edited by davidjohnson6; 5th Jul 2019 at 20:47.