The start of the season is disrupting the Air Territorial Continuity system. The bulk of the disruptions are concentrated at Linate, with a series of delays, if not cancellations. Passengers are furious about a problem that now appears to be structural, given the daily delays.

The regional transport department announced that the last meeting with Aeroitalia took place on Thursday. Aeroitalia, which was awarded five of the six routes on the island under the new Continuity service, which began on March 29th, "but it exceeded the two percent limit on cancellations set by the ministerial tender."

The disservices

"I had booked the 10:10 Linate-Cagliari flight for July 7th," says a Sardinian university professor who commutes to and from Italy. "Aeroitalia announced the re-routing on the 1:00 pm route. It means losing another morning, another."

"On June 26," the professor continues, "the 3:00 PM Linate-Cagliari flight took off at 5:45 PM." Three days later, on the return flight, the Boeing took off at 5:30 PM instead of 3:00 PM.

On July 1st, night fell again from the Lombardy airport to the Sardinian capital: just half an hour after midnight, the plane left the runway. Things didn't go any better on Friday: the 10:30 PM Linate-Cagliari flight, the last flight of the day, began taxiing an hour later. "It still left before the 9:30 PM flight, which took off at 11:55 PM," wrote Filippo Petrucci, a former city councilor and historian by profession, who was attending a conference in Milan, on Facebook.

Company and Region

The carrier is remaining silent. Barbara Manca's office, however, explains that "official monitoring of the first quarter of service revealed that Aeroitalia made several dozen cancellations, a percentage slightly above the 2% tolerance threshold established by the ministerial decree." Penalties are imposed in these cases. "We have informed the company that if this threshold is exceeded even at the end of the summer, penalties will be imposed in October."

Alessandra Carta

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