First UK flight to Sharm el Sheikh under way

At 2.25pm, local time, on Thursday 19 December, the first UK flight for four years is scheduled to touch down at Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt. It will carry nearly 200 holidaymakers from Birmingham airport.

Four years ago, 224 people lost their lives aboard a charter flight to St Petersburg, soon after it had taken off from Sharm el Sheikh. In the wake of the worst aviation disaster Russia has known, many countries banned their airlines from flying to Egypt’s premier resort.

The UK launched an immediate airlift, and its ban lasted the longest. It was eventually lifted in October 2019, after airport security was deemed to be sufficiently enhanced.

Red Sea Holidays is the first tour operator to return, with charters initially from Birmingham, Manchester and Gatwick.

The appeal of Egypt’s premier resort is extremely strong – especially in winter. It has reliably sunny skies, the warm waters of the Red Sea and superb snorkelling and diving.

But Sharm el Sheikh has been through very difficult times in the past four years; at the peak, one million British holidaymakers a year visited Sharm el Sheikh and other resorts on the Sinai Peninsula.

Diane Hardy, a British visitor from Halifax in West Yorkshire, told me: “They can’t wait for us all to get back.

“I love it. We’ve been going for 13 years.”

Ms Hardy was at Sharm el Sheikh airport, heading home to Yorkshire for Christmas, via Istanbul – the standard route for travellers who have ignored the Foreign Office warning for the past four years.

Now that the resort is back on the holiday map for British sunseekers, tour operators are ramping up capacity, with the UK’s biggest holiday company, Tui, starting flights from a range of airports in February.

One very obvious new development is a wall, nearly 6 metres high, built to secure the resort against insurgents from the rest of Sinai.

In the 2000s there was a series of attacks on Egypt’s Red Sea resorts, including Sharm el Sheikh. The Foreign Office warns: “Terrorists are very likely to try to carry out attacks in Egypt.”

Its official advice urges against travel anywhere outside the security perimeter of Sharm el Sheikh. Which rules out trips to St Catherine’s Monastery – location for the Biblical burning bush, where Moses was appointed by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt – and Mount Sinai, the most scenically spectacular location in the peninsula.

“Sometimes, it felt like Famagusta here,” said Ms Hardy– a reference to the resort on the island of Cyprus that has been empty of tourists since the Turkish invasion in 1974.

Even though Red Sea Holidays has been discounting some of its package holidays, the travel industry believes there is still an appetite for Sharm el Sheikh.

The question is: will the security measures prove sufficient to avoid any repeat of the tragedies at the resort, and will holidaymaker tolerate the sometimes intrusive security?