Aviation regulator may cancel Atlasjet Ukraine's domestic routes over year-long idleness
On June 19, Ukraine's State Aviation Service sent a letter to Lviv-based Atlasjet Ukraine to inform the company that all its rights to domestic flights except for the Kyiv-Lviv-Kyiv route may be cancelled because the company doesn't operate them.
This was announced by partner of Ante law firm Andriy Guck, who represents the interests of Atlasjet Ukraine, on his Facebook page.
"The State Aviation Service has found that Atlasjet doesn't operate domestic flights! And [it] has requested for explanations, as the rights will be cancelled at the next commission meeting. That's true, not using designated flights for 12 months could be the ground for cancelling the routes," he wrote.
He said that on June 11, the airline sent a letter to the aviation service requesting information about whether the regulator monitors the actual route use statistics of such airlines as UIA, Windrose, Kharkiv Airlines, amongst others.
"On October 9, 2014, there was a commission meeting under the Infrastructure Ministry's old order No. 245. The materials prepared for this meeting mentioned the actual use by the applicants of their flight rights, namely, UIA has 190 flights and uses 80 of them, Windrose 26 and 10 respectively, Wizz Air 48 and 26, Dniproavia 61 and 17, Kharkiv Airlines 12 and 0. A rhetorical question: did UIA receive a letter from the Transport Ministry yesterday about the possibility of cancelling their rights to 110 flights due to the fact that they do not actually operate them? What about Windrose or Dniproavia?" he wrote.
According to the letter, which Guck posted a copy of, the State Aviation Service might cancel the following routes assigned to Atlasjet Ukraine: from Kyiv to Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, Odesa, Simferopol, Ternopil, Kharkiv, Kherson, Chernivtsi; and from Lviv to Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Kherson.
Atlasjet Ukraine was founded in September 2013. It is a subsidiary of Turkey's Atlasjet. The founders are Turkey's Atlasjet Havacilik AS, Lviv's AIS Group Ukraine, and Serhiy Pidhorodetsky.
Due to litigation, it carried out its first flight between Kyiv and Lviv in June 2015.
