Posted on 05/11/2015 6:08:45 PM PDT by Gamecock
Saudi Arabia has terminated its contract with the Portuguese airline Hi Fly after it flew an empty jumbo jet marked with the logo of the kingdom’s national carrier, Saudia, to Ben-Gurion Airport for repairs.
The announcement was reported in the Twitter feed of a Saudi news agency.
The arrival of the jet with the logo to Ben-Gurion Airport overnight Tuesday generated a stir in the Israeli media on Wednesday after surprised airport workers spotted the plane.
The plane in question, an Airbus A330-300 devoid of passengers, arrived from Brussels to Tel Aviv for routine maintenance work with the Bedek Aviation Company, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), officials said.
A European client that works with Bedek for plane maintenance happens to lease its jets to various corporations, including Saudia, they explained.
"IAI confirmed that the Airbus came to IAI facilities in order to have maintenance work done due to an agreement that IAI has with a European company that leases the plane to Saudi Arabia," a spokeswoman for IAI told The Jerusalem Post.
Typically, routine maintenance on such planes takes about a few weeks, officials said.
Saudia – also called Saudi Arabian Airlines – is the national airline of the gulf state, based in Jeddah. Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have diplomatic relations.
So Saudia fired the company that flew the plane to Israel.
My question is, who will fly the plane back to Saudi Arabia? Certainly not a Jewish crew. Will Saudi send pilots to go fetch it’s plane?
Granted Saudia crew might be made up of foreigners, but if they go to Israel they will get an Israeli passport stamp and then won’t be granted admission back to the Kingdom.
Quite a conundrum.
Where it the P.L.O. when you need them? They could fly the planes to some remote outpost. < / sarc >
LOL! That would be a solution for sure!
Well, it is a leased plane. If I was Saudia, I’d tell the owner it was its problem.
One solution might be to repaint the plane, fly it back to Europe with crew ‘A’, repaint it again, and fly it back to Saudi with crew ‘B’.
Either stupid by the contractor, or someone was trying to make a statement that backfired.
lease it to the EL AL, put the star of David on it and make MORE money than when a raggie airline.
Wow, you really have to be anti-Semitic to get so mad that you make an ass out of yourself from knee jerk.
Has there ever been any doubt that Saudi is anti-Semitic?
So, MH370 finally shows up in Israel, under Saudi Colors.
Who would of thunk that.
Oh thanks. Now everyone will know.
The “Saudi” plane is a French/German plane, designed in no smart part by Jews, and brought to Israel for expert repairs. How to recover from the blow to Saudi pride, but to convince some westerners and Jews to train some Moslems to fly it into a skyscraper designed and built by westerners and Jews! YOU MUST BE SO PROUD, MOHAMMED!
You seem to know very little about the business of aviation, passport stamps, etc. Visit Israel! (They don’t stamp your passport if you don’t want them to.)
Burn the plane to the ground. Then bill the Saudis for the cleanup.
L
Israel gets a few billion it can use to finance its "black ops" and hide from public scrutiny. And not to worry, in case the weapons should ever fall into the wrong hands, the Israelis have planted malware in the bombs code that will enable them to disable the bomb at any time, or to prevent the nuclear material from being used in a dirty bomb, they can cause a fizzle, and make a lot or terrorists "glow in the dark."...call it an industrial accident.
Israel stopped stamping passports sometime in 2013, so my information is just a tad out of date.
Still, there are plenty of frequent travelers who carry two passports because they carry a passport with an Israeli stamp and need to enter Arab countries where they are forbidden.
I love your theory/concept. I could see this cloak and dagger mission in a movie.
Saudia make much, much more money than EL AL.
But on the downside, Saudia is dry.
Years ago, I was flying on Saudia back to Jeddah from R&R in Khartoum. I bought some minis of Beefeater’s at my hotel for the short flight back home. I was enjoying a martini as we were rolling down the runway. Not far from Jeddah, I poured a second one, and put a half-mini in the seat pocket in front of me. I could just see some Saudi finding the mini and thinking, “praise Allah, it’s a miracle!”
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