Any more whispers jerbourg about STN being dropped?

No nothing, I got the info from an Aurigny insider so seemed genuine.

Jethros indicates that the first new ATR is due this month. Any news of when this may be?

Morning and evening times are the most popular: that's why Aurigny have chosen to serve the route then. "Middle of the day" times tend to have lighter loads.
How long it two airlines can compete like this remains to be seen. It happened before when Jersey European took on KLM UK. They didn't compete for all that long.
Yes, the route has utilized G-HUET, but at times an ATR72 is used.
Loads have been good. I was told this at check-in at SOU a few weeks ago. Some have been full. Very attractive fares have been offered, at £19.99 well below LGW prices.

Aurigny seem to be running with one Dornier at the moment. G-LGIS has been off for 3 days but G-OAUR hasn't been out for a few weeks. Any ideas what is happening - are both a/c tech?

Both G-OAUR and G-LGIS were in the hangar (along with G-VZON) this afternoon. G-OAUR was last in service on the 6th. Both are undergoing maintenance. To create space G-SAYE was moved outside. (Don't know why they are hanging on to this fairly useless frame.) All Dornier flights were operated by G-ETAC today which meant cancelling services to SOU or running others at different times. Alderney residents are bound to have their own thoughts.

Thanks for the comments. I have wondered why they acquired G-SAYE in the first place as it is a lower spec a/c than G-LGIS (it has a lower MTOW, hence reduced capacity). It seems to me as well that if they need 2 a/c operational every day to offer the ACI service, then relying on a 31 year old a/c as part of a fleet of 3 is perhaps being a little optimistic. I guess that they should have bought 3 new a/c once they had decided on the move to Dorniers, but perhaps they weren't allowed to do so.

G-OAUR is still out of service after 1 month. This seems like rather a long time for routine maintenance on a relatively new a/c - I wonder what the problem is. G-LGIS is also out of service for 4 days, so they must be having problems there as well.

The Dornier saga goes on & on !

Do they still have any Trislanders in operation? Been a while since I took a look.

No all the Trislanders have gone, more than a year ago now

From what I gather, the Alderney schedule requires a single ACI-based airframe with 4x daily flights to GCI and 2x daily flights to SOU. Which means that Aurigny has three Dornier 228s to cover a schedule that requires a single airframe. So effectively they have the luxury of having two spares in the hangar? So it should be no surprise that examples are not to be seen for a considerable time. Or am I missing something here?

Do Aurigny operate occasional charters to Spain?

Looked up G-HUET on FR24 and saw it had made the trip GCI-AGP-GCI back in December last year. Return sector was over 3.5 hours! Impressive for an ATR42. In Feb and March of this year an ATR72 also operated down there.

Wasn't sure if these were charters (as hadn't seen these mentioned before) or if they were for other operational reasons.

G-HUET as well as all three ATR72s went to Malaga last winter and onward to Las Palmas for maintenance. One of the legs from GCI to AGP and return took pax - a special put on by Aurigny.
As for the Dornier saga, one airframe can do the required flights over the winter months, but the schedule requires two - one based overnight in ACI, the other at GCI. Normally the Guernsey a/c goes to ACI and on to SOU, while the Alderney aircraft begins the day with a trip to GCI. If flight times are adjusted for one a/c to do the lot, starting from ACI, it means a delay for the GCI-ACI first flight of the day and a delay for the morning ACI-SOU sector.
Forgetting G-SAYE (which is a bit of a disaster with its limitations and no longer flies) there should be one spare airframe, not two.

Interesting! Thanks for the information.

Latest projections for AUR are a £9.7m loss next year - to add to £7m for this year & £4m for last year. The States of Guernsey are attempting to determine what exactly is in its & AUR's best interests to make the airline a "going concern". Meanwhile, the "Runway Extenders" are continuing to push their pet project on the promise of enabling low cost carriers, larger aircraft & lower fares to be offered. Pie in the sky ! Larger aircraft, low cost airlines & lower fares will only materialize as a result of a large increase in demand. With a population of 65,000 people & a declining tourism industry, this will not happen. If the States want AUR to continue to operate, & especially if they want it to be profitable, then the last thing that they should be doing is extending the runway & letting low cost carriers operate to the island. AUR could never compete with Easy Jet etc. AUR could never make a profit in those circumstances. Even if they maintain their monopoly on the Gatwick route AUR will struggle to become profitable. The only way for them to achieve that would be to cut the fleet to three ATR 72s, drop the E195 & drop all their other routes, with the possible exception of Southampton. Discuss .....

Drop Manchester? don`t think so

Discuss...... Hardly any need as your comments make pretty good sense! Consider how Aurigny's aircraft are utilized. Often an ATR flies for half a day only - two round trips from GCI. Aircraft seem to have considerable leisure time. EasyJet don't keep their aircraft on the ground; they use them all day and into the night! Also, you're right that EasyJet won't be interested in GCI for the simple reason that the island is not a big enough market. Well - on a positive note those new ATR72s will soon be on the way. It will be interesting to see whether their fog-breaking qualities will make the investment really worthwhile. ;)

I came back from Manchester a couple of weeks ago, and there were only 24 people on it. The time before when I was flying to SOU, I counted 16 people board the Aurigny SOU whilst the Blue Islands one was almost full. Yet, they are blaming everyone else for their losses.
I can see Flybe/Virgin whatever they will be called re-start the MAN at some point to link in to Virgin long haul. Last time Flybe operated the route, the flight was more or less full every day, operating once a day around lunch time. Their licence got revoked as they were accused of cherry picking when they operated the route. Funny how now Aurigny can operate flights to JER from GCI only when they think they can make money, which from what the crew are saying is another route with extremely poor loads.

On the other hand is it not possible that the decline in Guernsey compared with Jersey is due to the absence of low cost access?

Guernsey's population is basically half the size of Jersey's; there is a problem of strategy/utilisation but also a complete political failure to address Aurigny's funding, and a lack of political joined-up thinking in the simultaneous introduction of open skies and the decision to fund a competitor airline to fly a competitor route (Heathrow); although Economic Development say the route was offered to Aurigny but Flybe offered a cheaper and better-timed operation, the end result (if one looks at the CAA stats) is an almost direct leakage of 3-4k passengers per month from LGW to LHR, and the States of Guernsey spending about £66 per passenger (when I last worked it out, including lost revenue on GCI-LGW) to compete with itself. As far as I can see the only way Aurigny would ever balance the competing ends of making money and providing a satisfactory level of service would be in a protected regime with sole operator status on GCI-JER, with a larger market supporting the community service and intense seasonality of the ACI operation, and on GCI-LON as the thickest market in supporting the wider regional operation, which could then be left to open skies. This setup would effectively use the profitable (commercial) part of the operation to support the unprofitable (community service) part, which was the traditional model of Aurigny operation from 1968. However, now that genie is out of the bottle there will in practice probably be little change of squeezing it back in again. In the absence of suitable regulation, the only other way is to derive a suitable cost advantage on the routes - particularly the inter-island ones might work well for electrification in the next 5-10 years - which could destroy the rationale for competitors' ATR/Q400 ops. But that requires investment and foresight which is also presently lacking. Probably only a new generation of politicians and managers would get us there on that - but one just has to hope that the current setup doesn't sap to extinction the political will for Aurigny's existence in its current form.

How many daily long-haul passengers can an island of 65.000 generate? Realistically, not enough to make a P2P-route worthwhile, given that you need at least two daily flights as otherwise those connecting need to overnight at least once at the transit airport.

Surely you're looking at this the wrong way round? Guernsey should be marketing destination Guernsey, surely? With European holidays becoming more and more expensive there is probably going to be a once in a generation opportunity for destinations like Guernsey to fill their boots as long as they are prepared to invest in the resources/marketing/infrastructure to service an influx of inbound tourism. Part of that will be runways that can take A220/319/320/B737 aircraft. Unfortunately GR have proven themselves not fit for purpose despite some protectionism so let them go and let someone more efficient take over. Lost jobs will quickly be replaced with some imagination from the Guernsey state.

There are ways and means of protecting slots by offering out PSO routes and stipulating airports/frequencies. Look at NQY...no-one would have thought a few years ago that they would be operating in and out of LHR but there they are. The airlines losses are growing year on year with nothing on the horizon to save them. Best to let it go having done the required legwork in the mean time to secure services on a risk-shared PSO basis as so many other airports have done. It's not rocket science but it does require some vision and growing a pair from the authorities.

Had email from Aurigny today stating that their Summer 2020 flights to Jersey and Southampton are now available to book, also that these routes will be operated by their new ATR-600s. If that is the case has the lease on their ATR-42 HUET expired or will have by then?. They also stated that Bristol, East midlands, Norwich, Manchester and Leeds/Bradford would be available to book next week but no mention of Stansted, is this a oversight i wonder or are they going to chop this route as rumours have suggested a while ago, anyone know?

HUET is due to leave the fleet by March 2020 according to Jethros.

Rumour has it that G- HUET is moving to Loganair shortly and Blue Islands will be training the Logan pilots!

Don't have any insight but the ATR Gatwick flights have not been loaded yet (only the Embraer ones).Considering Gatwick self-handling has a big gap between the GR605 departure at 11.55 and the GR606 arriving at 15.45ish (can't remember the time off the top of my head) I wonder if Stansted could be replaced by a midday LGW rotation with a bit of shuffling on the ATR services and timings.

I looked at the LGW flights for various dates in May and was a bit surprised to see only the four Embraer flights loaded but also was confused to see that the flight times advertised returning from LGW to GCI were much longer than the flight times for GCI to LGW, i know they are block to block times but even allowing for a busy LGW the four different returning schedules varied from one hour I0 mins to one hour 25 mins?. I would expect the additional ATR flights will be added soon.

There are a few negative comments floating around on Aurigny's facebook page following the late running and cancellation of Gatwick flights yesterday due to a passenger's illness. He required oxygen resulting in the need to replace an oxygen bottle on the Embraer before it could take off. One was shipped in from Guernsey on an ATR, which was itself delayed due to the required paperwork for carrying the bottle (dangerous cargo). Various people are asking why Aurigny weren't better prepared for such a basic situation and also why there wasn't a supply of oxygen bottles in Gatwick. Any thoughts on the operational aspects of this situation?

It really all depends on whether the passenger had pre-notified their requirement.

I'm not sure that you can expect someone to prenotify a requirement for a medical emergency.