Hellas Jet, the subsidiary that Cyprus Airways (CY) has set up in Greece, is due to commence flights from June, the national carrier confirmed yesterday.
Hellas Jet will also operate in the domestic air transport market in partnership with another airline company, probably Aegean Airlines, reports from Greece said yesterday.
CY spokesman Tassos Angelis said Hellas would begin by linking Athens to five European destinations, London Heathrow, Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, and either Frankfurt or Munich. He said the airline had already leased three Airbus A320s.
Angelis said passengers from Cyprus would be able to use the new airline, although the national carrier already has direct flights to the slated routes, except Munich. But Angelis said CY only operated two flights per week from Cyprus to Brussels. “So passengers from here can go to Brussels via Athens,” he said, adding that he doubted it would be a more expensive option.
Angelis said every aspect of Hellas Jet’s operation was already in place, including staff, livery design and uniforms, but he said CY was keeping it all under wraps until the official launch of the airline. He could not say when that would be.
He said that most of the airline’s staff were Greek and that they had received 200 applications from pilots. Several small Greek airlines collapsed after the September 11 terrorist attack in 2001, which devastated the global air transport industry.
CY decided to set up Hellas Jet following its decision to pull out of a bid for ailing Greek carrier Olympic only days before September 11. CY’s main rival in the bid for Olympic was Greek carrier Axon, which subsequently went bust.
Hellas Jet is 49 per cent owned by Cyprus Airways. Greece’s Alpha Bank owns a 26 per cent stake, while the remaining 25 per cent is held by Omega Bank of Greece.
The partners in the airline established Hellas Jet to capture a share of the expected increase in traffic during the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.
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.
