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Aurigny is still waiting on delivery of a new nose landing gear for one of its ATRs that was damaged in February, as the global shortage of aircraft parts continues to impact its services.
That damage was just one of a number of technical issues that plagued the airline earlier this year.
While those technical events were all "utterly outside" of Aurigny's control, they were handled badly - and that's damaged the airline's reputation locally - admits the CEO, Nico Bezuidenhout.
In the second part of an exclusive interview with Express, we look at those events and what went wrong.
Pictured: Aurigny's hangar was empty when we visited as all services were running to schedule on that day.
Prior to 2024, Aurigny could claim a strong record for reliability and punctuality.
In 2018, Aurigny's average punctuality rate was 5% higher than the average for carriers operating within or to/from the UK.
During the covid years, Aurigny's punctuality rate improved further, putting the States-owned airline 8% above the UK average.
In 2023, comparisons with British Airways, EasyJet and other well known UK carriers, would have put Aurigny 5% ahead based on punctuality alone.
However, Mr Bezuidenhout knows that whatever happens over the next three months, 2024's punctuality rate will be well below that achieved in previous years.
"This year has been particularly challenging, and in this context, from a reliability standpoint, it has now been rectified and I think we're over the worst, but it has been disappointing," he acknowledged.
The reliability decline began in February, when flights to and from Guernsey were affected by high levels of weather related delays and cancellations.
During the 29 days of February, fog was noted on 16 days - a monthly record.
On top of that, Aurigny started facing an increasing number of technical problems - including the completely unexpected grounding of an aircraft when a fault was detected with its nose landing gear after a hard landing.
"A lot of the incidents that we had this year, the vast, vast majority were utterly outside of our control," said Mr Bezuidenhout.
"If we look at what contributed, especially between February and March, we dealt with a number of wild card events.
"These events consisted of, for example, a landing incident that ended up destroying a nose landing wheel on an ATR. It just so happens that nose landing gear is in great shortage across the global industry. That happened in February and to this day we still don't have a new landing gear. It's still waiting to come out of the manufacturer, and we've had to rely on loan landing gears, and it took us four months to get that rectified, with loan landing gear on the aircraft.
"Now, all of a sudden, you're sitting with a small airline where you have four or five aircraft in your main fleet, if you unexpectedly lose a unit for four months that's 20% of my capacity that is just ripped out from underneath me."
Pictured: One of Aurigny's ATRs.
As an airline - with equipment enabling close analysis of all data to detect any faults long before they are visible to the naked eye - Mr Bezuidenhout insists that there was a backup plan in place incase any of Aurigny's aircraft was unable to fly.
But those backup plans failed.
"...we had backup plans. We had a contract with a wet lease provider from the UK. And a wet lease provider is an airline that provides a service to another airline and will operate and provide you an aircraft and crew to operate your schedule.
"We had plans to put that in place, but that particular airline failed to deliver, notwithstanding us having a signed agreement and the physical aircraft actually being here. From the 10th of January to the end of October that was meant to be in place. It just didn't. It just failed to materialize."
To compound these problems, within a week of the ATR being grounded, and the back up plan failing, the Embraer Jet was grounded too.
The jet was still flying hundreds of passengers to and from the UK each week at this time, but plans were already in place for it to exit service later in the year.
When corrosion was detected on its thrust reversers, it had to be grounded immediately.
"Again, a totally unforeseen event," said Mr Bezuidenhout, "and now you've got two out of your four operating aircraft unexpectedly grounded. Your backup was the wet lease operator, who fails to deliver and there was a third maintenance event.
"These three events, collectively between them, (meant that for) 106 days this year we had between 25% and 75% of our available aircraft capacity taken out of commission."
Pictured: Corrosion was detected on the Embraer Jet shortly before its 10 year maintenance check, which was happening just before the aircraft was due to be sold on.
While aircraft being taken out of service for maintenance, including unexpected technical issues, must happen all the time, Mr Bezuidenhout said the issue was that neither the corrosion to the Embraer Jet's thrust reversers, or the nose landing gear issue with the ATR, could have been predicted.
"We do, on average, within our current year, about 16,000 flights. We've not had one nose landing gear failure. We operated the Embraer for 10 years - not once was there grounding due to corrosion.
"For this to happen at the same time in February, and February just so happened to be the foggiest February on record in Guernsey according to the Guernsey Met Office...so, I have a combination of a multitude of events.
"To an extent, we do expect some events to arise so that is why I had the arrangement in place with the wet lease operator. So do you expect the wet lease operater to fail? So for three events to happen simultaneously, and your backup to fail, the question then becomes, how many backups do you actually end up making?"
The reliability problems which started in February continued into the spring and summer months though, with the Embraer Jet eventually leaving Guernsey, and Aurigny's ownership at the end of May.
Mr Bezuidenhout said ultimately that didn't have any impact on the reliability problems - even with new routes being launched - as the jet had to be grounded regardless.
Pictured: Nico Bezuidenhout has been CEO of Aurigny since 2020.
"The jet turned 10 on the 14th of June, and when that happens the aircraft is due 10 year checks.
"That's a very heavy maintenance check that has to happen. So that was the deciding factor of when the aircraft had to leave.
"There's another aspect too, not just the calendar but the amount of hours available on the aircraft. (The jet) had 150 hours left that it could be flown, or alternatively the 14th of June, whichever comes first. So we had very limited time that we could use that aircraft.
"What made that more complicated was the fact that corrosion was discovered on the thrust reversers, which resulted in the aircraft being grounded immediately. That is not optional, it's not a management decision. It's a safety aspect. You found corrosion that you did not know existed on the aircraft, and now you have found it you can't unfind it, and you have to ground the aircraft, and that is why they the aircraft wasn't fully available to be used, rather than anything to do with the exit of the aircraft.
"Even if we kept that aircraft and we didn't sell it, that same event (corrosion to the thrust reversers) would have happened, and that's why I think that it's fully understandable why the local community would relate the exit of the Embraer and some of our new route launches with unreliability, because it happened at the same time, but they don't relate."
Pictured: Aurigny committed itself to flying new routes - including to Paris - months before technical problems affected its services.
Aurigny's problems did coincide with new routes being launched though - notably the Paris service which started in April.
Other routes which were 'rested' in May, while the myriad technical issues were dealt with, resumed in July, by which time there were still reliability issues affecting many passengers.
"Those routes were launched on the 20th of October 2023, well before these events occurred in February," explained Mr Bezuidenhout.
"And these new routes, only started on the first of April, and that kind of illustrates the point that these disruptions predated the launch of the new routes."
In our exclusive series of articles this week, Nico Bezuidenhout will explain why Aurigny flies so many different routes, and how he decides which flights to cancel when problems arise.
He'll also explain why making a profit is only third on Aurigny's list of priorities, and how Government ownership works here and elsewhere in the aviation sector.
Mr Bezuidenhout also shares his thoughts on Aurigny's staff.
A podcast of the full interview will be published on Friday.
EXCLUSIVE: Aurigny's boss on regaining your trust
OPINION: He is the right man for the job
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