By a Staff Reporter
WHATEVER millennium bug fears other airlines might have, one start-up Cyprus airline has all the confidence of any upstart enterprise that, Y2K or no, it will take off as a new charter service, and later become a new commercial carrier.
It’s called Helios and right now it has no aircraft. But come May 2000, its first Boeing 737-400 will take off from its Larnaca Airport base as the first Cyprus-based charter competitor to Eurocypria, charter airline of Cyprus Airways (CA).
“At this stage, the licence is only to carry charter passengers from Europe to Cyprus, and not to carry any Cypriots outside, so it does not conflict 100 per cent with the interests of Cyprus Airways or Eurocypria,” Helios Director Yiannis Makedonas told The Sunday Mail.
But Makedonas admitted Helios aims to be the first Cyprus-based commercially scheduled airline, when eventual EU membership forces open the island’s skies to other carriers besides Cyprus Airways.
As things stand now, there is only one Cyprus-based charter airline, Eurocypria, competing with the 86 Europe-based airlines that fly charter tourists to Cyprus, Makedonas noted.
“So we thought: let’s increase the share of Cypriot airlines in that market,” he said. The government agreed, and the airline was granted the licence in May 1999 to begin operation a year later.
Helios expects to compete favourably with the European charters as a no-frills operator. It will offer the same duty-free, catering and baggage handling that other charters do — plus as many or as few frills as tour operators choose to pack into their packages. “It’s up to the tour operator,” Makedonas said.
Helios is starting small, leasing a single, 170-passenger 737-400 for operation next May. Two factory-fresh Boeing 737-800s, each with 189 seats, will next be leased in March 2001.
All three will be registered in Cyprus and fly the Cyprus flag. And all three will give Helios a head-start in the race to become the first commercial competitor with Cyprus Airways.
“Of course it’s in our plans,” to become Cyprus’s first commercial scheduled airline after CY, Makedonas said. “And with the liberalisation of the skies, I think Cyprus will be obliged to come along.”
“It’s part of our EU accession agreement. Already it applies to EU members that the skies should be free. And that means that any airline belonging to an EU country can fly freely to any European country without restriction, as far as I understand, on January 1, 2001,” he said.
Makedonas said he thought that when the government issued the company its charter licence to compete with Eurocypria, it was “actually looking towards the liberalisation of the skies in the year 2001”.
When fully airborne in the summer of 2001, Helios will employ about 85 people, 22 of them pilots and 44 cabin crew, operating out of Larnaca and Paphos.
The majority shareholder in the privately owned airline is Cypriot shipowner Kyriakos Mouskos, and Swiss investors hold the remaining shares. The company’s chief executive officer is Markus Seiler, a Swiss national with previous airline experience.
