UK airline says Egypt suspends flights to Sharm el Sheikh

(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly) British budget airliner EasyJet has said Egypt has placed restrictions on U.K. airlines flying into Sharm el-Sheikh frustrating efforts to repatriate hundreds of tourists stranded there since Wednesday.

In a message to passengers on Friday morning the low cost airline said: “The Egyptian authorities have currently suspended U.K. airlines from flying into Sharm el-Sheikh which means that your flight will not now operate today.

“We are working with the U.K. government at the highest level on a solution. In the meantime we are also developing a contingency plan so we can bring you home as early as possible as soon as we get permission to fly.”

Earlier on Friday the British government had announced that U.K.-based airlines were to run flights for some of the approximately 19000 tourists in the Egyptian resort who were planning to return this week.

EasyJet Monarch and British Airways all said that they were sending empty aircraft to the Egyptian resort in order to pick up passengers who have unable to leave.

But there was confusion both in Egypt and Britain over whether the flights would actually operate.

In a statement on Friday morning EasyJet said that none of the rescue flights it was planning to send from London had been granted permission to land at the Egyptian airport.

However Monarch another U.K. airline operating flights to the resort tweeted that its own rescue flights “are currently on the way to Sharm”.

“We expect all our aircraft to depart as planned later today” it said.

One passenger at Sharm el-Sheikh airport Leon Klon said that he had been told by officials that additional rescue flights sent from Britain could not land because of a lack of space at the airport.

“There were six flights that were supposed to fly from London and come here but as far as I can find out from the airport officials they told us that there was so much traffic here ... that they could not possibly accommodate the 10 extra flights coming here” Klon told the BBC.

Earlier in the day Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin had told ITV’s Good Morning Britain program that “most of the people who were expecting to be home by tonight will be home by tonight”.

Passengers were told their luggage would be flown back to Britain separately and returned to them around seven to 10 days later and that they would be permitted to take just five kilograms of hand luggage on the 19 passenger-carrying flights expected to depart on Friday.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Thursday that it was “more likely than not” that a bomb was involved in the Russian airline disaster on Saturday.

All 224 passengers on board the Metrojet Airlines flight bound for St. Petersburg were killed when the plane crashed in the Sinai desert shortly after taking off from the Egyptian resort on Saturday.

Several other countries and airlines have followed the U.K.’s lead in cancelling flights to and from Sharm el-Sheikh.

Ireland and Belgium have also advised their citizens to avoid travelling to the Egyptian resort by air while carriers including Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa have suspended their flights.