Flybondi rents the Andean fleet to compensate for its grounded planes due to lack of dollars

Flybondi airline has chartered Andes, another local airline that currently operates charter flights compensate for the lack of planes which has due to the inability to transfer dollars abroad.

The agreement between the two private companies was revealed this weekend by the specialized portal Aviación News and provides that Andes will supply Flybondi with its two Boeing 737-800 planes, with crew and on-board services included, for four months.

Last Tuesday, Flybondi confirmed the alliance with Andes through a statement. “Thanks to this agreement, both companies can strengthen our activities, which for Flybondi is very positive in a context where we have had to make changes to our operational capacity. for reasons of public knowledge“said the CEO of the company, Maurizio Sana.

Flybondi has a fleet of 15 aircraft, all Boeing 737-800s rented on a “lease” basis, of which three have been grounded since the beginning of the year due to unpaid dollar debt with foreign suppliers due to the exchange rate .

Two of these planes are grounded due to non-payment of rental and the third is in Costa Rica for scheduled maintenance, but could not be brought back in time, again due to non-payment.

A fourth plane, which crashed while landing in Mar del Plata on January 5 (it hit its tail on the ground), remained out of service for the rest of the month, until last week.

As a result, many of the Flybondi flights in January were canceled or rescheduledat an average of approximately 1,300 passengers per day, 15% of the 350,000 it was expected to transport over the course of last month. The agreement with Andes aims to normalize the flight schedule from now on, company sources said.

Andes, owned by a group of tourism entrepreneurs, had stopped flying as a regular passenger airline after the pandemic, in what were the last flights of its old MD 83 plane, which it had purchased from Aerolíneas Argentinas. It resumed operations mid-last year, with two more modern Boeing 737-800 aircraft, but only with charter flightsmainly for graduation trips.

The first flight from the Andes to Flybondi took place at dawn on Saturday with the Boeing 737-800, registration LV-KFW, completing flight FO 5276 from Ezeiza to Bariloche, Aviación News reported.

Flybondi is a “low cost” airline that has all its planes registered in Argentina, but mainly belongs to foreign capital. The lead investor is Cartesian Capital Group LLCfollowed by Yamasa Co. Limited AND Giving Capital as well as private investors from Argentina and Europe.

Although it was the emblem of the “air revolution” of the Mauricio Macri government, its greatest expansion occurred after the pandemic: during the previous government it moved its flights from El Palomar airport first to Ezeiza, then to the listed destinations Air park metropolitan. It currently flies to 18 domestic destinations and three destinations in Brazil, with an attendance of 19% of the domestic market and 7% of regional flights.