Air Malta CEO’s wife boarded ‘irregularly’ onto club-class middle seat

A London Gatwick airport source has confirmed that ground-handling staff refused to allow the wife of Air Malta chief executive Peter Davies to board Air Malta KM117, because the flight was overbooked and staff passengers cannot fly in such cases.

According to new information passed on to this newspaper, the embarkation of Sue Davies on a 24 May Air Malta flight at 11:55am took place "irregularly," because the chief executive's wife was placed in a middle seat in club-class - which seat does not even appear on the passenger manifest.

Mrs Davies was "scuttled off" into club-class after repeated calls from Peter Davies's office to allow her onto KM117, when ground handling staff had previously refused to allow her on.

The source at London Gatwick airport said that ground handling staff refused to allow her to board the plane because KM117 was overbooked, with four passengers extra. "Ground handling, which are engaged by many other airlines as well as Air Malta, were aware that Mrs Davies was travelling on the industry-standard staff travel policy, which means that in the case of an overbooked flight, staff passengers do not fly."

Air Malta last week denied that the flight's delay of 48 minutes was due to any tardiness on Sue Davies's part and said that she happened to have been present 90 minutes prior to check-in at the airport.

But MaltaToday has since established that Peter Davies, the €500,000-a-year chief executive, might have wanted his wife to board KM117 on Friday, 24 May because he was due to catch a connecting flight to Cape Town, South Africa, for a two-day aviation industry conference.

The Davieses are now understood to be on holiday there for the next week.

Airline staff who spoke to this newspaper last week claimed the reason KM117 was delayed was that personnel from the CEO's office in Malta were demanding that Sue Davies be given a club-class seat.

It appears that she was allocated a middle seat - 3B to be precise - in club class, when it is customary for club-class passengers to have their middle seat left free as a perk for their high-priced ticket. In fact, the middle seats do not appear as part of the passenger manifest.

"The call to have Mrs Davies take the middle seat on club class was done from the CEO's office, four times," an Air Malta source said last week. "Since the alternative was that she misses the flight, given that it was overbooked, they wanted to have her seated on the jump seat next to the pilot. But we couldn't allow that, so Mrs Davies was upgraded."

For its part, last week Air Malta sensed that the press was onto the story and claimed in a statement that incorrect information had been leaked "with the malicious intent of implicating Mrs Susan Davies as the cause of this delay."

Air Malta indeed confirmed that it was a misunderstanding by the airline's new ground handling agent at London Gatwick in processing overbooked passengers on the flight which first delayed it by 20 minutes. Another 28-minute delay resulted from air traffic congestion at Gatwick and in London airspace.

The airline insisted that Davies was not handled "any differently to other staff passengers," but the airline did suggest that delays to the flight were not due to "the actions of those acting on her, or the CEO's, behalf" - giving credence to claims that flight staff was called four times from the CEO's office to have Mrs Davies board.