AeroSvit Airline has announced that all delayed flights to Boryspil International Airport from abroad have departed, as have most of the company's flights from Kyiv's main airport.
Assistant AeroSvit Director for public relations, Serhiy Kutsy, said that as of 16:30 on August 1, all delayed flights from Kyiv to Tbilisi, Hamburg, Moscow (Vnukovo), Athens, the Odesa-Istanbul flight, as well as several internal flights to Donetsk and Odesa had departed. The other flights, in particular, to Dusseldorf, Kaliningrad and Simferopol, are getting ready for departure. In addition, all aircraft that failed to depart on schedule from foreign airports on Monday morning had returned to Boryspil by 14:00-15:00, reads the press release.
Earlier, the airline’s representative in Donetsk, Borys Soldatko, told Interfax-Ukraine that the situation has normalized and that all flights have commenced departure apart from two – the flight to Istanbul, which is awaiting an aircraft from Moscow, and which will depart at 23:00, and a flight to Athens, which is awaiting an aircraft from Kyiv, and will depart at 18:00-19:00.
Soldatko also said that passengers that missed their flights due to the delays were provided with food and beverages, as well as accommodated at the hotel at the expense of AeroSvit.
"AeroSvit Airlines again presents its apologies in connection with the cancellation and delay of a number of flights on August 1, 2011 due to a protest by pilots of Boeing 737 planes," reads the press release of the company.
As reported, the pilots demanded the indexation of payments over the 2008-2009 financial crisis period and the payment of wages under a new regulation that increases wages by 18%.
Due to the protest, some 5% of the airline’s flights were delayed on Monday.
"Unfortunately, the League of Linear Pilots did not warn the airline administration about the protest beforehand, due to which the administration failed to take the necessary measures to prevent it. The administration of the airline considers this protest, with regard to its scale and the way it was organized, as inappropriate to the [pilots’] demands. At the same time, due to the pressure of the executive committee of the League of Linear Pilots trade union and some of the Boeing 737 pilots, the administration as quickly as possible held the necessary talks and satisfied the demands of the protesters," the company said.
