BLUE ISLANDS SPECIAL
THE sudden suspension of operations at Blue Islands has left passengers scrambling, politicians demanding answers, and many Islanders wondering how a publicly supported airline reached this point.
While the headlines may feel abrupt, the warning signs have been building for years — and much of that story has been hiding in plain sight…
This summer, Comptroller and Auditor General Lynn Pamment delivered one of the clearest signals that all was not well.
Her ‘Critical Infrastructure Resilience – Transport Links’ report, published in August, assessed the stability of Jersey’s essential travel connections – and Blue Islands featured prominently.
Central to her concerns was the government’s £10m loan to airline, issued during the pandemic and intended to safeguard air connectivity at a time when global travel had all but collapsed. The loan came with a suite of Key Performance Indicators designed to ensure the airline delivered value for taxpayers.
But Ms Pamment found that there was “no evidence” the government ever monitored Blue Islands’ performance after handing it the loan.
This “lack of monitoring” she wrote, was “particularly concerning” given growing frustrations about Blue Islands’ service reliability at the time.
The C&AG report was published just one month after it emerged that Blue Islands had not paid back any more of the taxpayer-funded loan in the previous eight months.
Last year, Blue Islands had repaid just over £1.4m of the capital sum as of 30 September 2024.
But by May 2025, a freedom-of-information request from the JEP revealed that figure hadn’t moved in eight months.
And despite a repayment schedule tied to quarterly instalments, Blue Islands had not repaid a single pound of capital in the previous two quarters.
The loan’s timeline had already been relaxed once. Originally due to be repaid by the end of 2026, the government moved the final repayment deadline to 31 December 2028 after the second Covid wave disrupted the airline’s recovery.
When asked last year whether Blue Islands was in breach of the loan agreement, Treasury Minister Elaine Millar did not directly answer – instead emphasising the airline’s importance to connectivity and the government’s commitment to maintaining travel choice for Islanders.
Operational issues compounded the financial ones. The C&AG warned that Blue Islands’s small fleet of five aircraft presented an “inherent risk to resilience”.
It meant that any maintenance delay, technical fault or unexpected damage could ripple quickly through the schedule – and it did.
In May 2025, Blue Islands announced the cancellation of 28 flights after delays in receiving a new aircraft and damage to another. Four routes were affected.
Meanwhile, the airline was actively promoting its new Paris route – a move that risked stretching its already limited fleet even thinner.
According to Ms Pamment, enthusiasm for expansion was beginning to compromise the stability of existing routes.
“There is a danger that in promoting the new Paris route, existing routes are compromised,” she warned.
The full picture of what happened behind closed doors remains incomplete. States Members were briefed yesterday, but the government has so far released few details.
Last summer, the C&AG warned that the system meant to monitor Jersey’s critical air links wasn’t working as it should. Now with 21,000 bookings impacted, those warnings seem less like audit findings and more like a roadmap of how we got here.
More in the JEP’s Blue Islands fall-out special e-edition out tonight.
