Jozsef Varadi, CEO of Wizz Air declares that they could not bring out the planes out of Ukraine due to the War.
According to him, before the war, the share of these two countries in the revenue of the airline was 7%, and because of the war, the flights to Russia were completely suspended.
"The war dealt a direct blow to the airline. We couldn't get the planes out of there, but we managed to employ the staff in our chain. The biggest problem is the impact of the war on the economy and the consequences of the sanctions, which lead to an increase in the price of aviation fuel. Also, aggravation of inflationary processes, which may lead to recession.
As for the direct impact of the war on the airline, Russia and Ukraine accounted for 7% of the total flights. In the first 3-4 months of the beginning of the conflict, we transferred these volumes to other markets", he told BMGTV.
According to him, due to the personnel crisis in the aviation sector, the airline had to cancel a record number of flights in the summer.
"Airports are experiencing very serious problems, and because of this, we had a very difficult summer season in terms of operations. The demand is quite high because people want to fly after the pandemic. 6% of flights across Europe are canceled due to staff shortages at airports. We were not immune to this situation either and we canceled quite a few flights. Historically our flight performance rate stnads at 99.7% and the number of canceled flights has been quite low at 0.3%. We have canceled 6% of flights this year, which is 25 times more than our number of canceled flights. This is a very high rate, but I repeat, we could not be an exception. I hope that the service companies will overcome this problem and the current situation will be adjusted, although I don't think that this challenge will be completely overcome by next summer", says the general director of Wizz Air.
