Air Malta passengers disruptions continued on Thursday with the airline suffering two more substantial delays, one of them of over five hours.

Flight KM478, due to leave Malta for Paris on Thursday at 6.25am, is now scheduled to take off at 1.35pm, a delay of five hours and 10 minutes, according to Malta International Airport’s website.

Another Air Malta flight, KM100, to London’s Heathrow airport, was also delayed from the scheduled 7.15am departure to 10.13am.

Passengers were left fuming with one saying: 

“There are families, people going for business, people going for medical appointments. We don’t know where our luggages are.”

KM100 passengers were told that a technical issue arose 10 minutes before the flight was due to leave. Many had already lined up at the gate to board.

On Wednesday, the national airline’s COO attributed recent flight delays to an aircraft shortage that the entire industry is facing.

Declan Keller said several aircraft manufacturers, such as Airbus, had found corrosion in certain aircraft parts as a result of the length of time planes spent idle during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said airlines were also finding it difficult to source parts because other airlines are currently doing the same, grounding planes and further limiting the number of planes available for wet leasing.

Last week, an Air Malta flight from Brussels landed eight hours after its scheduled arrival time, the airline citing technical problems as the cause of the delay.

Earlier that same week, two Air Malta flights between Rome and Malta were delayed by over six hours.

On April 4, the airline had been affected by a technical system error causing 24 flights operated between April 5 and 8 to show as 'cancelled', while in December, Air Malta had warned customers that they were likely to experience delays in the foreseeable future due to the airline outsourcing its baggage handling service.   

Questions have been sent to the national airline about the current delays.