Norway’s autumn holiday week got off to a bad start for those hoping to take off with Norwegian Air over the weekend. The airline cancelled four flights on Saturday to two of holidaymakers’ most popular destinations, Alicante and Malaga in Spain.
The airline, which had a wave of cancellations right when the summer holidays were beginning as well, claimed a lack of crews to operate the flights was purely coincidental and not another work slowdown by disgruntled Norwegian Air employees.
“Those who were available to work had already worked too many hours in the air already,” Norwegian Air spokesperson Charlotte Holmbergh Jacobsson told newspaper Aftenposten. Reserve teams to fill in for a lack of pilots and cabin crew had already been assigned to other flights, she said.
“We tried to help (passengers) as best we could, but are of course sorry that this happened,” she added, calling the cancellations “a result of unfortunate circumstances.”
Many schools around Norway are closed this week for the annual høstferie, or autumn holiday. It stems from the time school children were needed on farms to help harvest the year’s potato crop, and was originaly called the “potato holiday.”
newsinenglish.no staff
