TWO Eurocypria flights were forced to return to Larnaca with technical problems within 12 hours of each other on Friday evening and yesterday.
The Eurocypria Dublin flight was one and a half hours into its flight on Friday after leaving Larnaca at 8pm when the pilot announced there was a technical problem and he would be returning to base.
One of the passengers told the Sunday Mail the pilot had told them that if he continued to his destination, the plane would have been grounded until the fault was fixed.
The 189 passengers were brought back to Larnaca and then transferred to the Hilton in Nicosia. They were not told when the flight would be departing, they said, and had not been told what the fault was.
Eurocypria chairman Lazaros Savvides said the aircraft computer system was giving conflicting signals and would have to be checked. He said yesterday morning the company itself did not know when the flight would be operated.
“There was a technical problem concerning the readings from the computer,” he said. “We are trying to see if we can fix it as soon as possible. I can’t give a reply as to when they will have completed checking because the company doesn’t know.”
Later in the day, Savvides said the aircraft had been fixed and was conducting a test flight, but that the company was trying to lease a plane to operate the Dublin flight, because all of its other aircraft were busy. By 4pm the passengers were on their way back to the airport after being told the flight would go ahead.
Also yesterday morning, just after 7am, a Eurocypria flight to Basel in Switzerland, with 150 passengers on board, returned to base after ten minutes, again for technical reasons. The flight was rescheduled after a short delay, Savvides said.
Eurocypria has just resumed its full schedule with its own aircraft after one of its six planes was grounded for 23 days.
The plane was grounded by Civil Aviation at the beginning of June because the company did not have enough pilots to operate its six aircraft. Eurocypria was then forced to lease a plane at a cost of £1.5 million for the duration of the grounding. Around 50 flights were carried out by leased aircraft.
