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Failure - even on the farewell!
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by PANORAMA reporter
The last Iberia flight from Gibraltar back to Madrid had to be cancelled on Sunday evening,due to the weather, which has prompted Spanish media to remark that even on the day of farewells, there was failure.
Certainly this airport is prone to landing and take-off problems because of the weather, even though such conditions do not affect other airports. It is another negative aspect of flying to Gibraltar.
This is well known, and airlines have to organise alternative flying for passengers who end up being stranded. At one point being diverted to Tangier was the vogue, now it is Malaga.
Ironically, passengers were offered to use Malaga at the weekend when more than one cancellation took place.
Those passengers scheduled to leave Madrid for Gibraltar were offered Malaga as an alternative, but they were told that the cost of travelling from Malaga to their destination in the Campo area, for example, had to be met by the passengers themselves.
Iberia started flying to Gibraltar on 16 December 2006 after the Cordoba agreement a few months earlier. But the daily flights became twice-weekly due to the low load factors on the route.
GB airways was to inaugurate their flights later in May last year, but only lasted the summer.
The collapse of the much-heralded Madrid route is clearly a blow to the tripartite talks, as this was seen as a visible success of the talks.
Early on, there was much talk of other routes to Spanish airports being opened up. There was talk of Barcelona - even Bilbao. But nothing materialised.
The use of smaller aircraft has also been mooted, but these are diffuclt times for airliners to experiment with new routes which others have abandoned on the grounds of unprofitability.
Even if a small airline were to take the plunge, it would remain to be seen if they would be able to sustain the vagaries of the route.
If the big boys like Iberia and British Airways (on a franchise to GB airways) were unable to make it pay, there will be question marks about smaller airliners being able to make the route profitable, although smaller aircraft might be easier to fill than the bigger ones used so far.
The Gibraltar government appears confident that an opportunity may now arise for someone else to start flying on the route.
The problem is that if airlines keep abandoning the route, Gibraltar will receive in the industry nothing but bad publicity as an airport, it is being pointed out.
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