Eirjet

Eirjet was a charter airline with its head office on the grounds of Shannon International Airport in Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.[1] It operated charter services to sun and ski destinations throughout Europe. Its main base was Shannon Airport.

Eirjet
IATA ICAO Callsign
Unknown EIR EIRJET
Founded2004
Commenced operations23 December 2004
Ceased operations18 October 2006
HubsCork Airport
Dublin Airport
Shannon Airport
Fleet size4
DestinationsChartered
Parent companyEirjet Ltd
HeadquartersShannon, Ireland
Key peopleBernard Healy (Founder)
Websiteeirjet.com

The airline ceased operations on 17 October 2006 after notifying Irish aviation regulators that it was unable to meet its obligations to its tour operator clients. Efforts to find new financial backing were unsuccessful.[2]

History
An Eirjet Airbus A320 leased from Air Jamaica at Orio al Serio Airport, Italy. (2006)

The airline was established in 2004 and started operations on 23 December 2004[2] with an inaugural flight to Agadir with an Airbus A320. Another two aircraft were added in summer 2005 to add flights from Cork and Shannon. One of them painted in Air Jamaica colours, its former operator. The company founders include former Skynet Airlines personnel and Bernard Healy, who owns Idray, a Dublin company controlling the operations of Omni Tours, Omni Travel, Malaga Express and Faro Express.[3]

Eirjet made an application] to the United States Department of Transportation to permit the airline to perform ad hoc charters between Ireland and the USA, within the US and from the US to third countries.[4]

The airline had an unusual philosophy of leasing aircraft. For example, on February 18, 2006, the airline wet leased all three Airbus aircraft to Ryanair and hired in three aircraft from airlines including Transavia, Flyjet and Eagle Aviation to cover its own charter program. Overselling its actual capacity and wet leasing in additional aircraft can be attributed to Eirjet's cashflow difficulties, with most subchartered activity costing the company far in excess of the revenue generated from operating the flights. At the inauguration of their operations, the company had only one Airbus A320 while their schedule demanded at least four aircraft.

Incidents and accidents
  • 29 March 2006 - Eirjet issued an apology after a flight it operated from Liverpool John Lennon Airport to City of Derry Airport on behalf of Ryanair landed at the wrong airfield, touching down at Ballykelly Airfield, a former RAF base and more recently an Army base some 4 miles away from its intended destination. The statement explained that the incident was caused by an "error by the Eirjet pilot who mistakenly believed he was on a visual approach to City of Derry airport".[5] An air accident investigation report in January 2007 reported that the pilot had been unable to obtain the correct set of charts prior to the flight, only obtaining them the day after the incident. The pilot stated that if he had seen the charts, he would have been fully aware of the existence of Ballykelly and would not have landed there. The crew believed the instrument landing aid system at City of Derry was malfunctioning as what they saw of the runway did not match the instrument readings and the presence of an instrument calibrating aircraft close by added to their belief that there was a technical fault. The report also stated that although an air traffic controller thought the jet was "slightly low" he did not warn the crew about the other runway.

Fleet

The Eirjet fleet consisted of the following aircraft:

Eirjet Fleet
Aircraft Total Previous
Operator		 Next
Operator		 Notes
Airbus A320-200 4 1 Air Canada
1 Monarch Airlines
2 Air Jamaica		 2 Mandala Airlines
2 Air Jamaica

In March 2006, Eirjet fleet average age was 9.6 years old.[6]

gollark: It isn't a very good case.
gollark: They had designed ARM CPUs for ages for their phones. Recently they got good enough and/or Intel annoyed them enough that they switched over.
gollark: ARM is an instruction set. "Traditional CPU[s]" use the x86 instruction set. People argue a lot over which design is best but broadly speaking there doesn't seem to be *that* much difference, although x86 has some advantages like I think greater code density and downsides like variable length instructions being annoying to decode.
gollark: That's not a very valid comparison. But Apple's cores are somewhat better than available x86 ones.
gollark: Apparently they did lose most of their CPU design team to some other company recently, so who knows.

References
  1. "home." Eirjet. 1 July 2006. Retrieved on 15 September 2010.
  2. Flight International 3 April 2007
  3. Airways magazine, March 2005
  4. http://dmses.dot.gov/docimages/pdf94/372694_web.pdf%5B%5D
  5. "Apology for 'wrong runway' error". BBC News. 2006-03-29. Retrieved 2010-02-28.
  6. Eirjet Fleet Age
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