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Air Serbia has terminated its cooperation with the Greek company Marathon Airlines with immediate effect. The Serbs are doing this because of the incident with an Embraer 195 that was lawful to the Greeks, which only took off hundreds of meters past the runway in Belgrade on Sunday and suffered major damage. Due to the termination of the cooperation, Air Serbia will no longer come to Schiphol with Embraers for the time being.
In the past period, the Belgrade-based airline leased four Embraers from Marathon (one Embraer 190 and three Embraer 195s), including crew, to supplement its own Airbus and ATR fleet. But Air Serbia informed the Greeks today, Tuesday 20 February, that the cooperation will be terminated with immediate effect. As a result, Marathon will no longer operate flights for the Serbs from Wednesday.
Although the investigation into the incident is still ongoing, Air Serbia does not want to wait for the outcome. "We are considering taking further steps in the coming period to prevent recent events from eroding passenger confidence."
Air Serbia itself has also been criticized in the past two days for initially downplaying this serious incident as something 'technical', when it could have ended much worse. For example, the aircraft skimmed far too low on the motorway to the airport. So now Air Serbia is taking hard action after all. The airline also apologizes once again to the passengers of flight JU324, which was supposed to fly to Düsseldorf.
The investigation should show exactly what went wrong, but there are indications that mistakes may have been made by the pilots. For example, they decided to take off from intersection D5, from where only 1273 meters of runway length was available, even though they were assigned D6. Communication with air traffic control showed that they were aware of this, but after calculations they still chose to depart from D5.
Schiphol
Air Serbia regularly used the Embraers leased from Marathon Airlines on the scheduled service between Belgrade and Schiphol, alongside other aircraft such as the Airbus A319, A320 and legitimate Boeing 737s, but that is now also coming to an end. The aircraft will soon be stripped of their Air Serbia livery.
https://www.luchtvaartnieuws.nl/nieuws/ ... s-incident
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