Air carriers explained the difficulties with flying to Egypt for Russian tourists

While the carrier and the aviation headquarters are blaming each other, Russian tourists who have paid for far from cheap trips to Egypt are “resting” at the capital’s airport for the second day. And for a reason that, in theory, an ordinary air passenger should not even know. But in practice, we always have everything for one – but they don’t stand like a mountain, but disentangle.

After talking with passengers of flights that did not fly to Egypt and their relatives, aviation officials and pilots, we saw the situation from different angles.

So, on December 15, two flights from Moscow to Egyptian Hurghada and Sharm al-Sheikh and one return flight failed to fly along the agreed air corridors and, accordingly, remained at the port of departure. That is, all the passengers of these completely tourist liners unexpectedly ran into difficulties, not only moral (those who did not fly to the resort miss the longed-for days of vacation, but from the resort they involuntarily skip work), but also material: unplanned to get stuck at the airport, no matter if it is Egyptian or Russian, equally unpleasant.

– And all Jordan cursed! – Marya Petrovna, the grandmother of her granddaughter-student, who did not fly out on vacation, explains to me with an air of importance. – She took it and closed the sky and that’s it, bye-bye Anechkin’s accumulation! And the granddaughter saved up all year for this trip!

Surprisingly, according to the words of the airline that canceled its flights “because of the damned Jordan”, the country did something like that, as Marya Petrovna describes: she took it and closed it. And now the carrier needs to be beaten in front of its main department in order to be allowed to fly over Syria. Since Jordan closed itself, and Syria was closed to Russian passenger aircraft by the Federal Air Transport Agency.

According to the official version, the Aviation Command is now thinking about whether to allow homeless aircraft to fly to their destinations through Syria? But in an unofficial field, aviation officials retort:

– Flights over Syria were banned back in 2013, and since then the situation in the region has only become more dangerous. Transit country (Jordan – ed.) notified the carrier in advance, but he did not bother, which means that it is completely his fault.

– You want to say that the airline was warned that its planes would not be able to fly, and it not only sold out tickets, but even drove passengers to the airport?

– They were warned in advance that Jordan is now forced to demand Euro insurance from Russian aircraft with dual registration, assigned, in addition to the Russian Federation, somewhere else. And such insurance is done in the UK, which is now impossible for a Russian carrier.

So he didn’t have a choice?

– Why, it was possible to look for an alternative. Here is another carrier that faced the same thing because of its “dual citizenship” and transferred its passengers to another carrier flying through Antalya. But, of course, lost money. But his passengers did not lose anything. But if it has to return money for tickets, then it will lose even more.

And stuck (and so far without any clear prospects) passengers, sitting in thematic chats, already know even more than industry officials: the London Jordanians, they say, asked for insurance last Saturday, but the carrier did not even scratch it, hoping that it would carry . And tickets were not only sold to the last, but now they are on sale.

“Just yesterday, without knowing the situation, I took a ticket from this airline to Hurghada on December 29,” admits Muscovite Elena. – Now I don’t know what to do. However, no way. I have a ticket of a non-refundable category, accidentally fell out of the refused mailing list.

– Yesterday, when my daughter’s flight was already delayed and the departure was postponed to 23.00, – says the mother of a vacationer who did not get to the resort, – I opened the aircraft aggregator and saw offers for their flight! With carefully corrected departure time. Another sinful thing I thought, maybe they are understaffed and they are thus waiting for passengers on burning tickets? But if someone bought yesterday, then he also walks in obscurity with the rest. Although they were given some vouchers for food, everything is expensive at the airport.

The carrier facing the Jordanian “wall” has 36 flights a week on its schedule. Is it all gone? And how then do other Russian airlines fly to Egypt? I address this question to a civil aviation pilot.

Until February 24, the route, for example, Moscow-Hurghada went over Ukraine, Crimea, the Black Sea, Turkey and Cyprus, only 4 hours and 42 minutes. And after the 24th, they flew through Georgia, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which extended the travel time by almost 2 hours. We have not flown through Syria for almost 10 years. And now the problems are due to the fact that almost all transit countries of the route have closed air corridors for airliners with dual registration – not only Jordan, but also Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea and Yemen.

At the time of writing, passengers on the delayed flights were hoping to depart after 20:00 today via Syria.