Friday, September 25, 2009

SX-OAO and SX-OAN delivered to Olympic Air





At 00:01 on Tuesday next, September 29, Olympic Airlines will be liquidated and it's operations will be transferred to Olympic Air, thus ending 35 years of state ownership of Greece's national airline. In March of this year the Greek government announced that it had reached an agreement to sell the flight operations and technical support of Olympic Airlines to the Marfin Investment Group. The announcement was the culmination of the Greek government's attempts over a ten year period to return the company to private ownership. In recent months the new Olympic fleet has been assembled in various locations throughout Europe in preparation for next week's launch. Two of the aircraft in the new fleet SX-OAO and SX-OAN were sourced from Privatair's German subsidiary and prepared by Shannon Aerospace for their new operations. A third aircraft SX-OAJ was sourced from Airbus after Mexicana backed out of an aircraft order. All three aircraft were painted in Shannon, OAJ at the Lufthansa paint hangar and OAO and OAN at Shannon Aerospace. 
Over the past two days a total of 8 aircraft - six A319 from Southend, Norwich and Shannon and two A320 from Berlin have been delivered to Athens in preparation for next week's launch. It was originally intended that SX-OAOA and SX-OAN would depart Shannon on Thursday but SX-OAN developed a snag and was delivered today, Friday. 
Seen above in the copyright pictures by Constantinos Mark Zervos (Athens Airport Blog) are at top, A319 SX-OAN on arrival from Shannon today and at bottom the line up on taxiway 'B' at Athens, LGAV, of SX-OAO, OAG, OAH, OAF and OAR, SX-OAO having been delivered from Shannon on Thursday. 

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