The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday extended its ban on US commercial carriers flying to Israel for another 24 hours.
The move, announced about 12:40 p.m., means that thousands of tourists remained stranded in Israel and “tens of thousands” of Israelis were stuck abroad.
The US and many European airlines first cancelled flights to the country on Tuesday over fears of Hamas rocket attacks near Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv.
“The whole industry is on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” the manager of a major travel agency in Tel Aviv told the newspaper Haaretz.
And a Hamas leader said Wednesday the cancellations were a “great victory” for the terrorist group.
“The success of Hamas in closing Israeli airspace is a great victory for the resistance, and is the crown of Israel’s failure,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement.
Travel agents were swamped with desperate calls from frustrated visitors trying to get out, as well as from Israeli citizens stuck in other countries trying to get home.
Making matters worse, they will all have to pay for their accommodations and new plane tickets because the flights were cancelled due to security concerns – which means they can’t sue airlines or travel agents to recover their costs.
Delta – which cancelled flights along with United and US Airways – had already extended its ban on flights to Ben Gurion for at least another 24 hours before the FAA’s decision.
“We made our decision wholly independent of both of them. We made that decision well before the FAA made any pronouncements,” he said. “We have a much higher level of care, and we have to make the right decisions for the flight attendants, customers and flight attendants on our flights,” Richard Anderson, Delta Air Lines CEO, told CNBC.
Anderson also dismissed criticism from ex-Mayor Bloomberg, who took a flight to Israel on El Al Tuesday night to show air travel was safe.
“I can’t speak for the FAA or Mayor Bloomberg,” said, saying safety was his only concern.
Last year, an average of 1,044 passengers flew each way on the four daily flights between the US and Israel on American carriers, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
All the Israeli air carriers – El Al, Arkia and Israir – are continuing to operate flights on schedule.
And the Ministry of Tourism, which blasted the cancellations Tuesday, said 22 foreign airlines are continuing flights to Israel, including British Airways, Aeroflot and Ukrainian Airlines.
The airlines suspended the flights – at the height of the July/August tourists season – after a rocket launched from Gaza on Tuesday hit a building a town just over a mile from the airport.
the cancellations come at the height of the tourists season.
Roughly 4,000 Israelis stranded in Turkey were in a more serious jam than others, since no Israeli airlines fly to Istanbul.
Transportation Minister Israel Katz on Wednesday ordered that the Uvda airport north of Eilat be opened to international travel – though Turkish officials balked at flying the Israelis there.
Yossi Fattal, head of the Israel Travel Agents’ Association, told Haaretz that “tens of thousands” of Israelis were stranded outside the country because of the cancellations.
“What we are advising travelers to do is simply buy a ticket on another airline that is flying to or from Israel in order to get to their destination quickly because the cost of sticking around and waiting for international flights to resume could end up being higher,” Fattal said, adding that the cancellations were devastating the tourism business.
“We are already seeing cutbacks and dismissals. Nothing this dramatic ever happened before because the last time international airlines stopped flying to Israel was during the first Gulf War, and that was in the winter, which isn’t a peak travel season,” he said.
Air France and Germany’s two largest airlines on Wednesday canceled more flights to Tel Aviv because of ongoing safety concerns amid the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Germany’s Lufthansa and Air Berlin extended their cancellations through Thursday and Air France said it was suspending its flights “until further notice.”
The European Aviation Safety Agency late Tuesday said it “strongly recommends” that airlines refrain from operating flights to and from Tel Aviv. It said it would “monitor the situation and advise on any update as the situation develops.”
EASA acted after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration prohibited American-based airlines from flying to the airport following a Hamas rocket explosion nearby. The FAA was expected to issue a new statement later Wednesday.
Lufthansa said its decision applies also to its subsidiaries Germanwings, Austrian Airlines, Swiss and Brussels Airlines. In all, 20 flights from Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Vienna and Brussels were cancelled for Thursday.
The airline initially had suspended flights for 36 hours through the end of Wednesday. Those cancellations were extended because “at the current time there is no sufficiently reliable new information that would justify a resumption of air operations,” Lufthansa said.
Air Berlin said it is working in close contact with authorities and is continuing to evaluate the situation regularly to determine whether further cancelations were necessary.
Among other European airlines, KLM, Alitalia and Scandinavian Airlines also canceled flights Tuesday and Wednesday, but did not immediately announce their plans for Thursday flights.
British Airways, however, said Wednesday it has not canceled any of its Tel Aviv flights and had no immediate plans to do so. The airline would not answer questions about how it had made its decision to keep flying while others were canceling, citing security reasons.
— With Post Wires