Goodbye CityWing and Thank you for your 4 years of service!
Today marks a rather sad today for Gloucestershire Airport. The sole commercial airline operating flights to the airport has gone into liquidation. Virtual Airline CityWing Aviation Service Limited announced the news yesterday, stating that all flights from 11th March onwards would be cancelled with immediate effect.
The move comes after the operator of CityWing flights, Czech carrier Van Air Europe, had their license suspended by the UK CAA while they were under investigation relating to safety concerns. Despite CityWing’s best efforts to charter in other aircraft to fly their routes, the company started to make a loss and become economically impossible to run.
For a full, comprehensive report on the events leading up to today, check out the World of Aviation. All the details of the safety concerns, the following investigation and the CityWing situation can be found here:
This short compilation below details the small fleet of Van Air Europe Let L-410 UVP-E9 Turbolets operating CityWing flights from Gloucestershire to the Isle of Man. I hope it is a suitable tribute to the Little White Plane, that may never grace the skies of England again.
In a statement from Gloucestershire airport, it said they are looking for any airlines willing to take over.
Such a shame to see my local losing this airline, loved seeing that aircraft at Gloucester
Yeah I was thinking about making a topic about this as most of there flights operate in and out of the Isle of Man. Its sad.
When Storm Dorris hit they still decided to try and fly up to Belfast but could not land so they turned back but could not taxi off the runway and had to be tied down to water tanks and sheltered by fire trucks, they shut down the airport for a few hours ( No one else could land anyway, winds too high). Then the CAA removed Van air europe’s license the next day.
Emil, THE ISLE OF MAN IS NOT IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
It’s very unfortunate, the circumstances are very sad. On the plus side, Belgium Turboprop operator Jetfly is establishing a base at GLO with their PC-12s coming in pretty much every day!
CityWing had HQ and base at IOM. However, I do believe what you have said is incorrect information. I trawled through hours worth of reports and data to write the above report on my aviation blog. In short:
The aircraft (OK-LAZ) touched down safely on Runway 26 around 09:25L (09:25Z) and was about to vacate the Runway via Taxiway F when tower controllers instructed the aircraft to stop. Emergency services responded to the aircraft and the crew was subsequently instructed to shut the aircraft down. The passengers disembarked onto the runway and were taken to the terminal. The aircraft still had 200 kg of fuel on board.
Several rumours were floating around as to what happened exactly. One of these rumors is as follows. The aircraft reached the Isle of Man just before the storm. When the storm hit, winds picked up and it deemed unsafe to turn the aircraft out of the wind and taxi off the runway. The aircraft was instructed to stop and emergency services were dispatched, so that the trucks could shield the aircraft against the wind gusts. About 15 minutes later the storm front had passed and the aircraft was able to taxi to the apron.
However it was confirmed later by CityWing that OK-LAZ absolutely did have 200kg of fuel when she returned.
Sad stuff, hate seeing airlines go up in flames like this. Hope another airline picks them up… [quote=“morgan99, post:5, topic:103138”]
it said they are looking for any airlines willing to take over
[/quote]
They were a virtual airline indeed. They didn’t own or lease any aircraft, they simply had another company (Van Air Europe) operate flights for them. CityWing only sold tickets for their routes, another airline flew the routes.
