Czech airline Smartwings has joined a long list of European companies taking on additional aircraft this summer to meet the unprecedented rise in demand that comes as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

Smartwings to take on an A320

Smartwings has signed a contract with Romanian airline Star East Airline to wet lease an Airbus A320 aircraft this summer, BoardingPass reports. The contract will last from 4th June until 30th September 2022.

The A320 aircraft in question carries the registration YR-SEA and is exactly thirty years old. According to our data from ch-aviation, it has 180 seats in economy class, and it is stored at Istanbul Sabiha Gökcen International (SAW), where it was ferried on 1st September 2019.

SmartWings Boeing 737-800 taxiing at Corfu airport
Smartwings operates charter flights from multiple Central and Eastern European countries. Photo: Getty Images

Its first flight was in August 1992, when it was delivered to JMC Airlines. “JMC” stands for John Mason Cook, the name of the son of Thomas Cook. JMC Airlines was rebranded in 2003 to Thomas Cook Airlines UK, the British charter airline that infamously ceased operations in September 2019. It was one of many airlines to go bankrupt just before COVID hit the aviation industry in 2020, which was also the year that airline bankruptcies almost stopped taking place completely because of the large scale of government funding given to airlines worldwide.

Over the course of its lifetime, the aircraft had also flown for Thomas Cook Airlines Belgium and Mexicana, which was one of the world’s oldest airlines before it ceased operations in 2010.

Not the first time Star East Airline is flying for Smartwings

Interestingly, this Airbus A320 has already flown for Smartwings before. Back in the summer of 2019, Smartwings also commissioned Star East Airline to operate charter flights to summer holiday destinations out of Ostrava (OSR) in the Czech Republic. At the time, Star East Airline also had a Boeing 737-400 in its fleet, and this also operated flights for Smartwings.

The services that the A320 operated for Smartwings between June 2019 and September 2019 were:

In Spain:

  • Ostrava to Palma de Mallorca (PMI)

In Croatia:

  • Ostrava to Split (SPU)

In Bulgaria:

  • Ostrava to Burgas (BOJ)
  • Ostrava to Varna (VAR)

In Greece:

  • Ostrava to Rhodes (RHO)
  • Ostrava to Heraklion (HER)
  • Ostrava to Corfu (CFU)
  • Ostrava to Zakynthos (ZTH)
  • Budapest (BUD) to Chania (CHQ), jumping in for a Smartwings Hungary aircraft

In Turkey:

  • Ostrava to Antalya (AYT)
A SmartWings Boeing 737-700 about to land at Milan Malpensa
Smartwings has used the services of Star East Airline before. Photo: Getty Images

Who is Star East Airline?

The company Star East Airline was founded in 2016. It became an airline in 2017 when the Romanian Civil Aeronautical Authority issued it with an Air Operator Certificate. It is based in Bucharest Henri Coanda International Airport (OTP) in Romania.

The Airbus A320 that it will wet lease to Smartwings is its only aircraft. As mentioned above, Star East Airline also used to have a Boeing 737-400 in its fleet, but this aircraft has since been scrapped.

Sources: BoardingPass and ch-aviation

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