Critical at MAT – 1 aircraft in service

CRJ900 no longer with MAT (Z3AAG)

As of Monday, February 16, Macedonia’s national carrier, MAT, has only a single plane left in service – a fact expected to pose a challenge to the operation of its regular local and international flights. The airline’s other aircraft, a Canadair CRJ900 owned by MAT since 2006, is now at the Bombardier technical base located in Ljubljana, where it will be kept until June. Although MAT representatives claim no flights will be cancelled, the publication noted that maintaining the regular lines will prove to be a challenge for Macedonia’s only air carrier. For this week combined flights are planned between Skopje and Vienna and Zurich, meaning that passengers flying from Macedonia’s capital to Zurich will have a stopover in Vienna, while those travelling from Austria’s capital to Skopje will have a stopover in Zurich.

This is just the latest challenge posed before MAT in recent weeks. In December the airline was banned from operating flights to Germany and Italy because of its outstanding debt to the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, EUROCONTROL. The ban was still in place as of last week, when reports surfaced about EUROCONTROL’s pressure on MAT to change its name as a precondition to the negotiations about the debt settlement.