Sri Lanka's national airline on Tuesday accused a rat of having grounded one of its Airbus aircraft for three days, causing delays, worrying about the image given to future investors expected to bail it out.
The rodent was spotted on Thursday attempting to take advantage of a SriLankan Airlines flight from the Pakistani city of Lahore, forcing the company to carefully check that it had not chewed on critical components of the aircraft.
According to an airline official, the plane has since resumed flights, but the delay disrupted schedules, affecting other flights.
“The plane was grounded for three days in Colombo” and could not “fly without ensuring that the rat was found,” he said, adding that the rodent had been found dead.
The airline, whose cumulative losses flirted with 1.8 billion dollars at the end of March 2023, is also short of foreign currency to pay for the obligatory overhaul of the engines, which grounded three of its 23 aircraft for more than a year. .
Successive governments have failed to resell SriLankan Airlines, with one even unsuccessfully lowering the price to a symbolic dollar.
“Clandestine rat”
Aviation Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva told reporters that the underground rat risked scaring off "the few investors" who were still interested.
It is one of those state-owned enterprises considered a burden on the country's budget by the International Monetary Fund which bailed out Sri Lanka in 2023 with a loan of $2.9 billion over four years.
SriLankan Airlines was profitable until a management agreement with Emirates was terminated in 2008, after a dispute with Mahinda Rajapaksa, president of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015. The company had refused to give to his family, returning from vacation in London, the seats of other passengers.
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Ironically, one of its best years was 2001, thanks to insurance payouts covering the destruction of aircraft in an attack by the separatist Tamil Tiger movement, which also provided an unanticipated solution to a problem of oversupply.