Wizz Air Says It Wants To Get Trapped Crews And A320s Out Of Ukraine

Hungarian carrier Wizz Air says it has crew members trapped in Ukraine and is working to get them out.

“We still have some Ukrainian colleagues in the country,” Wizz Air spokeswoman Christie Rawlings said Wednesday morning Eastern Time, in an email.

“However, each day more and more colleagues and their relatives are either reaching safer parts of Ukraine or crossing the border to neighboring countries,” Rawlings said.

“We have been focused on helping our colleagues and their close family in Ukraine to move to places of safety and to provide all of the necessary support where needed,” she said.

The number of trapped Wizz Air employees is unclear.

The carrier has four Airbus A320-200s trapped in Ukraine following the closure of the country’s airspace to all civilian flights following the Russian invasion, the Swiss website ch-aviation reported Monday. Three planes are in Kyiv and one is in Lviv, ch-aviation said.

Wizz Air is one of the few foreign airlines with bases in Kiev.

In an email to Forbes, an employee, whose identity could not be verified, said Wizz Air should have acted more quickly to evacuate employees.

Information posted on an internal company website indicates that “many of those left abandoned in Ukraine are now left sleeping on the floors of the Kyiv subway, left in districts subject to bombing by Russia, losing their homes and living in constant fear,” the employee said.

The employee said that Wizz initially placed Ukraine-based employees on unpaid leave. But Rawlings said, “It is important to note, we are not and will not be putting our Ukrainian colleagues on unpaid leave. All employees on Ukrainian contracts (evacuated or still in the country) will receive their average monthly salary.”

In a note to employees, Michael Delehant, Wizz Air executive vice president, said, “We are deeply concerned for our teams’ safety and that of their families. We understand that you have some concerns related to some of our actions and the evacuation of our Ukrainian crews.

“We are fully committed to evacuating all of our people from Ukraine, if they would live to leave the country,” Delehant said in the undated note. “We are all doing our best to find the safest and earliest possible opportunity to take our colleagues out of Ukraine.

“We are in touch with local, international governments, aviation and security authorities and we have a pool of pilots on standby, ready to fly our colleagues and our aircraft out of Ukraine as soon as it becomes safe and possible to carry out that mission,” he said.