Startup Kiwi Regional Airlines is being grounded less than a year after launching.
The carrier started operations last year and offered regional services to Hamilton, Nelson, Tauranga and Dunedin with a single plane.
That plane, a Saab 340, is being sold to Air Chathams, which will also take on most of Kiwi Regional’s workforce.
Kiwi will run its current scheduled services until July 30, and then operate Air Chathams’ Whanganui to Auckland route with the plane while Air Chathams awaits its air operators certificate for the route.
Air Chathams is effectively taking over the airline but has no plans to take over its Hamilton and Nelson routes.
Kiwi Regional CEO Iwan Wilson said he was ‘quietly confident someone will step into the Hamilton-Nelson and Tauranga-Nelson routes,’
"What I supported was a plan to own a second aircraft and certainly that would have been my preference but that would have required the shareholders putting more into that," Wilson said.
"We know we would have had a very good summer but I wasn’t prepared to enter another summer with just one aircraft. People got very upset the three or four occasions where we had mechanical failures and had to cancel flights and that took its toll on our staff."
Air Chathams CEO Craig Emeny said Kiwi Regional’s plane, pilots and engineers would be ‘a welcome addition to the Air Chathams family.’
Air Chathams operates a fleet of five small aircraft serving the Chatham Islands, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Whakatane.
