The president and a senior officer from the States’ Trading Supervisory Board have met jointly with the leadership of both Aurigny and Guernsey Ports.
The meeting focused on building an enhanced level of co-operation between the two businesses. This is both to generally improve the services to their common customers and to avoid incidents like the absurd aborted trip from Exeter to Guernsey last Sunday ever happening again.
Afterwards, STSB President, Deputy Peter Roffey, held a further meeting with Aurigny chairman Kevin George and CEO Nico Bezuidenhout, and reinforced the frustrations that islanders and businesses have expressed in recent weeks.
The airline expressed confidence that the arrival of another leased aircraft next week, which will bring the ATR fleet back up to five, will overcome the disruption that has occurred in the last week.
Deputy Roffey said the service both during this time, and earlier in the year, had fallen far below what islanders had a right to expect.
“We have made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the level of disruption that has occurred during the airline’s ongoing fleet transition has been unacceptable. It has exposed a lack of resilience, and that has impacted a lot of islanders and on local businesses.
“In fairness to Aurigny’s management, they took active steps when they were hit by disruption in the early months of the year. We then saw a marked improvement, with June and July seeing the sort of reliability and performance that we have been used to in the past.
“Unfortunately the events of the past week have once again underlined there is still a lack of full resilience within the fleet.
“I am pleased that the airline has managed to secure another wet lease aircraft, which should be in service next week and that will hopefully have an immediate beneficial impact.”
Deputy Roffey said he was also confident that the incident late on Sunday night, when a flight from Exeter was diverted back to the UK, would not be repeated.
“That incident was unprecedented, and having met with representatives of both Aurigny and Guernsey Ports, at which all parties had a very frank exchange of views, I am reassured that it will not ever happen again. I can only reiterate once again my profound apologies to all those who were affected.”
