MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Iberia ready for the Madrid/Gibraltar round trip

Spanish airline Iberia carried out landing and take off tests in the Gibraltar airport runway over the weekend in anticipation of the first formal flight scheduled for next December 16.

Iberia will be flying daily an Airbus A 319 with a 140 passenger capacity, leaving Madrid at 11:50 hours arriving in the Rock at 13:00 local time, returning at 13:50 to be back in the Spanish capital at 15:00.

The flights are part of the trilateral Cordoba agreement reached last September between the United Kingdom, Spain and the local government of Gibraltar.

On December 16 all Spanish discriminatory restrictions on civilian flights to Gibraltar will automatically cease as well as bans of Spanish air space for all those aircrafts operating to or from Gibraltar.

Apparently Iberia has also agreed to change details of its website which listed Gibraltar under Spain according to an official release.

"Iberia assured the Gibraltar Government that it intended no political statement, and has already modified its website to show Gibraltar listed under Europe and not under Spain.

However, there is still one place on the website where, for technical reasons it has not yet been possible for Iberia to implement another of the required changes. The Government has been assured that this last remaining change to its website will be carried out during the next couple of days".

Gibraltar officials also met in Madrid with Spanish and UK representatives to discuss other issues of the trilateral agreement mainly land access to the Rock.

Jose Pons the Spanish negotiator said that he expected the red and green channels to be operating by Christmas although he predicted that no measures would lead to a total end to queues since practical problems remain in La Linea.

More access on the Spanish side needs to be matched in Gibraltar to avoid a bottleneck.

More significantly there are concerns in some quarters that the operation of the red and green channels might not necessarily increase flow from where it stands today unless there are sufficient green channels flowing efficiently beside a red channel where people with items to declare would queue.

This would also require a system whereby cars challenged in the green channel could be set aside to allow the rest of the traffic to flow.