As political crisis brings more unrest to the scene, air travel volume remains behind the level to trouble air transport business. However, the national carrier maintains efforts to survive. Amirah Ibrahim reports For the national carrier EgyptAir, the week has not prove a positive show for the airline which has been struggling hard to survive the economic crisis. Loses exceeded $1.7 billion, thanks to the unstable political and security conditions. Yet the carrier, full of hopes, keeps moving forward, with a plan to reshape resources and expenses. To continue with developing plans, the airline this week launched a new IT service to allow its customers in Scandinavian states to smoothly access the electronic portal and request services on line. The new service covers Sweden, Norway and Denmark. According to airline Chairman and CEO Ayman Nasr, the new service is part of the developing and upgrade project of the system providing services to clients. "The Scandinavian zone is such a vital market for EgyptAir," commented Nasr. "The new version of our portal is specially designed for Scandinavian clients who can now obtain more services while booking and traveling our route through Copenhagen," Nasr added. The airline over the past five years brought a large amount of investment to modernise its IT system and succeeded to hit a remarkable achievement among IATA airlines members when it moved completely to use electronic ticket and stopped using paper tickets four years ago. EgyptAir joined the world's biggest airline group, Star Alliance, and ever since it never stopped its upgrading and modernising steps, especially when it comes to using technology to facilitate travel experience. "The Scandinavian service on line is available in English with all services accessible to our customers; booking, ticket issuing, new destinations and flexible pricing which allows passengers much better choices. It also reviews flight information and sets schedules for three months. It can also be reached by different applications to facilitate the process for cellular, portable computers or PDA users." In addition to helpful travel items, the new service provides a number of special and carefully selected services to children not accompanied by parents, pets and special cases onboard. It also provides check-in service 48 hours in advance. The airline early this week revealed plans to organise the new Umrah season, where it said it was going to transfer hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Saudi Arabia. "We have completed all preparations to meet the demand by travel agents and operators who organise such holy trips for Egyptian pilgrims," stated Hossam Kamal, chairman of the Holding Company EgyptAir, the mother operator of the group. "These preparations are almost equal to those applied for the Grand Pilgrimage Hajj. The Umrah season will extend till the end of Ramadan on 18 August. We are scheduled to operate 1927 flights to transfer almost 540,370 passengers; 151 flights to Jeddah and 412 flights to Madinah." Kamal explained that the airline offered 50 per cent more in capacity comparing to the Umrah seasons in 2011, where 360,683 pilgrims traveled onboard EgyptAir flights to Jeddah and Madinah, The airline at present operates four flights daily to Jeddah; three from Cairo and one from Alexandria in addition to a daily flight to Madinah from Cairo and three weekly flights from Alexandria. This week however witnessed two accidents which clouded the airline. In the first a female pilgrim was badly hurt. On Monday at Saudi Airport of Emir Mohammad Ben Abdulah at Al-Madinah, an Egyptian female pilgrim had a terrible accident while disembarking from an EgyptAir plane. A statement by Airport officials said the woman was going down the escalator with more passengers arriving from Cairo among a group of pilgrims who sought to perform Umrah. The driver moved the vehicle suddenly and a technical error occurred resulted in an accidental shut down of the escalator. The woman fell down and her foot was hang in between the iron device. At King Fahd hospital, a surgery was carried out but the doctors had to split her foot. The woman was transferred to the German Saudi Hospital where she had an advanced surgery. The Saudi aviation authority opened an investigation into the tragic accident, where both the Saudi ground service and EgyptAir crew have been questioned over the accident. A Saudi newspaper reported that the cabin crew was partially to blame for allowing the passengers out of the plane against safety instructions. The airline did not comment on the whole incident. In Kuwait, a freight flight operated by the cargo branch EgyptAir Cargo was interrupted by a fire which broke out at a ground service vehicle serving the plane. The flight MSX500 was on an Airbus 300/600 on Tuesday. While preparing for the take off at Kuwait airport, a vehicle used to push back the plane from the tarmac to runway accidentally caught fire. The Airport authority sent a number of firefighting engines to the location and successfully put out the fire. According to Chairman Basem Guwhar, the incident left no causalities, neither in the crew nor in the aircraft. "The plane continued the trip to UAE Shareqah airport safely," he concluded
