[eno_]

Oh, and one more to contraindicate bad maintenence: The charter service has their planes serviced by a contractor in Norway. If this plane was falling apart, you might not want to fly any other airline that uses the same shop.

[Central Scrutiniser]

Which contractor in Norway, what was the level of the maintenance? Most likely they did C checks and D checks for the airline, that is pretty common for charters and small airlines to farm out that stuff, as you need a pretty extensive amount of capital (buildings, people, spares, etc) to do that maintenance. But, they also had to have their own maintenance staff for the day to day stuff to keep the planes in the air.

I still stand by the fact that their maintenance wasn't world class. When you have only 2 planes, the economics of scale work against you.

[Central Scrutiniser]

Little more info, the day before the crash, the plane was running nearly all day long without any overnight time, just the time between flights. It ran from Sharm to Turin, back to Sharm, then to Venice, to Cairo, and back to Sharm at 330 in the morning, with one hour turn around before its flight to Cairo then Paris DeGualle. Also read on an aviation board, but not confirmed yet, that Flash Air had been barred by Swiss officials from any operations in Switzerland, due to their poor safety record.

I'll do some more digging.