Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Tuesday the 20th of February and a bit of a special podcast today because I've been talking to one of the UK aviation industry leaders.

She is Marion Jeff Roy. She's the UK managing director for

Whiz Air. We had a wide-ranging conversation, which included the prospects for air traffic

control delays this coming summer. The issue of having to compete with giants like Ryanair and mighty British

airlines such as EasyJet. But we started with Marion telling me about a milestone for Whizair.

We just took delivery of aircraft number 200 in the Whiz fleet.

And that aircraft has been delivered to WISA UK to be based in Luton,

has actually already performed a few flights

and yeah, and it's increasing our fleet our 821 neo fleet

and but I mean the good news is that we're getting two more a 321 neos in March

so by the end of March by the end of the year, the WISA UK fleet will be 100%

A321 NEOs at both Luton and Gatwick. So the second good news is that the average fleet age in the UK

is currently with this new aircraft 1.97 years and going to go

down to 1.53 years once we receive those two additional aircraft in March. So that's unprecedented.

I mean, you're familiar with the industry average in Europe. It's more around 10 years.

And we're actually delivering not just a number,

but clearly efficiencies and CO2 emissions decrease.

So that's a noise, of course.

I mean, all that goes with the package of savings and efficiencies.

So that's really great news.

I think there is more and more awareness.

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