Originally Posted by
FlyToTheMoon12345
After waiting nearly 6 months for what I thought was a standard compensation claim I've been told the following:
The cancellation was due to circumstances completely outside of Emerald Airlines control. We had a fully serviceable aircraft and flight/cabin crew available for your flight, however, due to an administrative delay on the part of our Competent Authority (the UK Civil Aviation Authority), our flight was not permitted to operate on that day.
I'm not sure I believe any of this to be honest. The flight from GLA to BHD was cancelled and I was put on a flight to DUB instead and paid for a taxi to Belfast
There were lots of upheavals going on with Aer Lingus' domestic UK routes in November and December of 2022, so there may actually be something to this explanation.
Due to Brexit, neither Aer Lingus nor Emerald Airlines can operate domestic UK routes any more. It was around that time last year that BA had to be drafted in to run the Belfast to Heathrow route on a wet-lease basis for Aer Lingus, and when they announced the closure of their Belfast hub; they stopped even that BA arrangement as of last March.
I've found press reports that
it was only on 7 December 2022 that Emerald Airlines UK received its British AOC (Air Operators Certificate) and started operating; they had applied in March 2022 for a separate UK Air Operators Certificate in order to be allowed to continue flying these UK domestic routes from Belfast using a British AOC.
That article mentions that Belfast to Glasgow and Southampton were the first to be operated using the British AOC, with the other Emerald domestic UK routes from Belfast were still allowed to be operated under the Irish AOC; quite why some routes had to stop (mainline EI on Heathrow; and seemingly Emerald on your route, GLA, and SOU) while others were still allowed to continue (at least temporarily) is not clear.
However, it may very well indeed be that the UK CAA prevented Emerald from operating BHD-GLA on this particular date; quite why the "shutdown" appears to have been seemingly suddenly sprung on EI, prior to the issuance of the British AOC, and not uniformly introduced across all routes, is not something I can address.
See also
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/brit...-wetlease.html
(It would therefore appear that Irish/EU AOCs were no longer allowed to operate as of the start of the IATA Winter timetable, starting at the end of October 2022, but perhaps some leniency was shown on some, but not all, of Emerald's routes given the delay in issuing them the AOC they had already applied for months prior)