HELIOS Airways has been given temporary permission to carry out flights between Larnaca and Sofia in order to bring back Cypriots stranded in Bulgaria for over a week after the country’s national airline went into liquidation.
Sofia City Court this week appointed temporary syndics to the air company after its insurer Bulstrad JSC made a claim for Balkan Bulgarian Airline going into insolvency.
In an attempt to bring the remaining passengers home and to cater for travellers from Cyprus to Bulgaria, the island’s second charter firm Helios Airways has now been given a temporary permit to carry out flights between the two countries. The first flight left Cyprus for Sofia yesterday afternoon.
Helios usually charters flights only for tourists flying into Cyprus, but is set to discuss flights for outgoing passengers sometime this year.
The company’s Sales and Marketing Manager Andreas Christodoulides yesterday told the I that the 16.10 flight to Sofia that afternoon had been fully booked and that the return flight later yesterday was also expected to be full: “Balkan used to fly to Cyprus three times a week so there is a lot of backlog.”
He said an arrangement had been made for passengers already carrying Balkan Airline tickets to exchange them for Helios ones and that others had simply bought tickets directly with the airline.
The arrangement is expected to continue until next Thursday, he said.
A representative from Alasia Travel Agents, Balkan’s agent in Nicosia, yesterday told the Cyprus Mail that alternative arrangements had already been made for many of the stranded passengers, and that, “It is not a time when a lot of students want to return to Cyprus, for example, so there is a very small number of passengers left.”
The arrangement brought stranded passengers back to Cyprus via Athens with Olympic Airways or Budapest with Hungary’s Malev Airlines.
Some passengers were reported to have taken busses to Athens to catch connecting flights back to Cyprus.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
