After Thai airline, PC Air, managed to strand over 200 passengers in Korea this week for more than 36 hours, Thailand’s Department of Civil Aviation has warned them if they strand passengers again the airline will be grounded.
The warning came after PC Air’s only plane was unable to take off from a South Korean airport on its flight back to Thailand as the company couldn’t afford to pay their fuel bill. Passengers were completely stranded, with some having to get back to Thailand on other airlines.
Since then, PC Air has been all over Thai news media but the exposure they are getting isn’t good.
In fact, the new airline, made famous earlier in the year for being the only Thai airline to hire ladyboys (transsexuals) as flight attendants, is likely to lose passengers because of it. After all, few people want to fly on an airline that cannot even get their passengers home as they don’t have the money for fuel.
PC Air, however, says the whole mess was a misunderstanding. They are in the middle of a dispute with a Korean agent, SkyJet, dealing with their landing fees and fuel bills and it was the agent that didn’t pay the fees on Tuesday.
Since then, the fees have been paid and PC Air flights to and from Korea are back to normal.
One good thing about PC Air, though, as they are a new company they have to have their license renewed every month. That means, if Thailand’s Department of Civil Aviation suspects any problems, it will be easy for them simply not to renew the license.
Personally, we would fly PC Air and wouldn’t worry about them at all.
They seem like a good airline, friends who have flown them have told us both the flight and the staff were excellent, and the prices they charge for fares are cheap.
Problems can happen to any airline — once. If passenger strandings happened again, that is when we would be concerned.