BARCELONA , Jan29, 2012(AFP): Passengers were stranded at Spanish airports Saturday after airline Spanair abruptly went bust, cancelling all its future flights at half an hour’s notice.‘The company has decided to cease its operations as a measure of caution and safety,’ Spanair said in a statement late Friday, citing a poor financial outlook. Its last scheduled flight landed at 10:00 pm (2100 GMT), leaving rivals such as Iberia, Vueling and Easyjet to share out the passengers left stranded by the airline, which runs flights within Spain and Europe. Spanish media said at least 22,000 passengers were affected over the weekend. A queue of 200 surprised passengers formed at Spanair counters at Barcelona airport on Friday evening shortly after the announcement. By Saturday airports authority AENA said the situation was normal at Madrid’s Barajas airport and Barcelona’s El Prat, where special lounges had been allocated for Spanair customers. ‘Passengers are turning up at these zones and the other companies are putting them on flights,’ an AENA spokeswoman told AFP. She said 55 Spanair flights were scrapped at Madrid and 54 at Barcelona on Saturday alone, with a handful of flights cancelled on two of Spain’s major islands, at Palma de Mallorca and Gran Canaria. ‘The Spanair management regrets this and apologises to all those people who are affected by this situation,’ the company said. The Spanish government said it was taking disciplinary action against Spanair for breaching rules on continuity of services and passengers’ rights in the course of its sudden shutdown, and may fine it up to 9.0 million euros. The public works ministry said in a statement it was launching ‘sanction proceedings for two serious breaches of the Air Safety Law which could lead to fines of 4.5 million euros in each case.’ Spanair, which was founded in 1986 and has about 2,000 staff, had tried to survive by a tie-up with Qatar Airways which fell through. The company’s chairman Ferran Soriano told Spanish television the Catalonia regional authorities, who part of the company, would not continue investing in Spanair at a time of heavy public spending cuts. ‘When we learned this morning that the merger was not going to happen in time and that the Catalonia government was not going to contribute more funds, the most sensible and safe decision was to close down operations,’ he said. In 2008 one of Spanair’s jets crashed on take-off at Madrid airport with the deaths of 154 people. Spanair’s former owner, Scandinavian airline SAS, retained a 10 percent share in the Spanish carrier and said the bankruptcy would hit its own results to the tune of 191 million euros or $252 million.
