Olympic Air will take delivery of their first fully painted plane in ATH today. It is a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 registered G-ECOE. It is scheduled to arrive in ATH from SOU (Southampton, UK) at 20:00L. As we have written on July 23rd, it was painted in EIN (Eindhoven, Netherlands) and was ferried on 21/7/2009 to EXT (Exeter, UK) for final checks before being used by OA (see post). The checks were completed and the plane was ready to fly for Olympic Air. A team of Flybe's finest engineers has been formed and all together departed EXT this morning at 10:30Z. After departure from EXT and while in flight a door warning on the rear baggage bay door and a PTU fault indication forced the plane to divert to SOU. Since Flybe's finest engineers were onboard (in order to be based in Athens to look after the wet leased planes), they managed to fix the problems on the spot and continued the flight to Greece. This is the first (out of 4 agreed) plane that is wet leased from Flybe in order to assist Olympic Air at their start up period of August 2009 - September 2010 (see post). Photos of the plane in ATH will follow tomorrow, upon plane's arrival later tonight.
Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 / G-ECOE / parked in EXT, ready to be ferried to ATH (photo 31/7/2009)
Update 3/8/2009 19:50
Added the following photo of G-ECOE coming to land in ATH after a test flight to JKH (Chios, Greece)
Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 / G-ECOE / about to land in ATH, returning from a test flight (photo 3/8/2009)
Update 5/8/2009
The reason for diversion to SOU was identified and the post above was edited to include that.
