European Coastal Airlines (Split) has temporarily suspended all flights after the Croatian Civil Aviation Agency (CCAA) launched an investigation into its operations late last week.
In a statement issued via social media, ECA's chief executive Klaus Dieter Martin said the airline was fully cooperating with the agency adding that he expected flights to resume by the middle of this week.
The motion to investigate ECA came after several anonymous sources made allegations to the local Index news portal of poor operational standards and practices at the seaplane operator. Included in the report were photos purportedly showing corrosion on some parts of the carrier's DHC-6-300 amphibian fleet.
Dieter Martin has, however, dismissed the article as an attempt by disgruntled ex-employees to get one back on their former employer.
"The CCAA, various media houses and other institutions have been given false internal information by these former employees, as a revenge to our company," he said. "Naturally and thankfully, the CCAA has been at an audit and will proceed [sic] auditing our efforts. We highly appreciate this, as our utmost priority is the safety of our passengers. For this reason we have, for the time being, discontinued our flight operations."
Last month, the German threatened to pull ECA out of the Croatian market citing excessive red-tape. Then, he warned that the airline's expansion plans were drastically behind schedule due, in part, to the need to constantly fight bureaucracy as well as general government apathy to the project.
Founded in 2000, ECA only launched operations in 2014. It currently employs a fleet composed entirely of amphibian aircraft namely one Twin Otter -100, four Twin Otter-300s, and one Cessna (single piston) 182Q. It offers regular passenger flights along Croatia's Dalmatian coast as well as to the Italian Adriatic port cities of Ancona and Pescara.
