safety of charter airlines
The crash of the Flash Airlines 737 last week has really made me wonder about the safety of some of these airlines. On the rumours and news forum this week I read messages by some professional flyers voicing their concerns about airlines such as Flash - saying that you get what you pay for! According to what I read this airline had already been banned not only from Swiss airports but also their airspace for not meeting safety standards and it certainly seems that there were concerns about the state of the aircraft from previous pax. Pilots on the forum were saying that pax should check out who their carrier is. I do agree with this and always do so myself but it isn't always that easy.
A couple of years ago I posted a message on PPrune about the experience that my step-daughter had flying on a package tour to Kefalonia. When she booked the flight she was given the name of the charter carrier, can't remember now but one that was known to her. On arrival at Luton airport they were told that there flight was delayed due to technical problems with the aircraft but that another aircraft was en route. They finally boarded a DC-10 belonging to Electra airlines, a greek registered charter airline - they were horrified by the state of the plane, holes where oxygen masks should have been, broken seats and inefficient surly, cigarette smoking crew. It was a shocking experience cuulminating in a passenge finding one of the pilots and a hostess in a compromising position after landing!! But there's another story!!
At the time I was amazed that such an aircraft could be allowed to land at a British airport and transport British passengers. I rang the CAA who passed the buck to the Dept of Air Transport who neatly passed it back to the CAA. They were not interested.
So this week I decided to look up on the internet Electra Airlines to see if they were still in operation. It seems that they had expanded by buying two 757's and operated them for Air Scotland for flights to Spain in early 2003. That was until a few months later due to massive unpaid landing fees they were no longer allowed to operate from there. In August 2003 the Greek authorities evoked their licence due to them not meeting the required standards and thank god they are no more.
The point of this long message is that if airlines such as these are not paying such things as landing fees are they paying to have their aircraft well maintained?? And what should we as passengers do if we walk out onto the tarmac and find that instead of our expected carrier we have one of these dodgy operators there instead? And finally how come authorites in countries such as England and France don't listen to concerns of either consumers or other countries, e.g Switzerland about the state of these aircraft and carry on letting poor sods fly on them.