Flybondi airline cancels 125 flights at start of high season in Argentina

Low-cost airline Flybondi has canceled 125 flights between last Thursday and Monday at the start of the summer high season in Argentina. The cancellations affected 22,000 passengers on domestic and regional flights, and represented 25% of the airline’s scheduled flights for that period.  Complaints about delays and cancellations are frequent amongst Flybondi clients. According to the company, the high number of cancellations were due to “operational reasons” and low availability of planes to comply with the scheduled flights. In a statement sent to the Herald, Flybondi confirmed they had to cancel 125 flights in the past five days, but said they correctly operated over 520 domestic and international flights. When a cancellation happens, the “priority” is to relocate passengers in the available Flybondi flight closest to the original time or date, the company explained. “Given that we are at the start of the tourism season, the priority process can become more complex due to the high occupation level in all existing flights,” the statement added. Flybondi said that four A320 planes arrived in Argentina on Saturday to strengthen the company’s fleet until March, when the summer tourism season ends. The planes, they added, are scheduled to begin operating this week. Part of the reason why there were so many canceled flights was that Argentina’s National Civil Aviation Administration (ANAC) ordered the Ministro Pistarini international airport in Ezeiza to halt operations for four hours on Friday afternoon in order to carry out maintenance tasks on two runways. This caused 41 flights from different companies to be cancelled and affected the schedule for the following days. ANAC did not inform the concrete maintenance tasks that had to be carried out. On December 27, the Aeroparque Jorge Newbery airport in Buenos Aires City had to stop operations for nearly three hours after a section of pavement detached from the runway amid a heatwave, with temperatures rising above 35°C. Over 70 flights were affected at the time. Flybondi’s controversial owner Flybondi was launched in 2018 and became the first low-cost airline in Argentina. In mid-2025 it was acquired by a United States investment fund called COC Global Enterprise. The fund is led by Leonardo Scatturice, a businessman with close ties to the Javier Milei government. In the past, Scatturice worked as a spy for the Argentine intelligence secretariat SIDE. In June, around the time Scatturice bought Flybondi, media outlets revealed his lobbying agency Tactic — located in Miami, Florida — was hired by the SIDE to act as a link between the Argentine and U.S. governments, carrying out tasks such as organizing meetings on trade and investment, as well as advising the SIDE on strategic issues. It remains unclear why the intelligence agency hired the company for those tasks. Scatturice was also part of the organizing committee of the conservative conference CPAC in Argentina in 2024, in which Milei was the main speaker. Barry Bennett, a political advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, was also involved in organizing the event. In 2025, he was in the spotlight due to a scandal involving one of his airplanes. Aviation authorities detected irregularities with the plane’s luggage after detecting that 10 suitcases had not been declared and did not go through controls when the plane arrived.  The suitcases belonged to Laura Belén Arrieta, a fellow CPAC Argentina committee member, who was on board the plane. Their contents remain unknown. Scatturice and Arrieta are also part of the board of directors of OPC Tech, a company hired last year by the government to provide internet connections to all public schools for almost US$80 million.