Marathon Airlines

Is Marathon Airlines safe?

Mostly, with one large caveat. Marathon Airlines has never had a fatal accident, flies under EU safety rules from Greece, and in July 2026 passed the IATA Operational Safety AuditIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary. But in February 2024 one of its crews wrote off an Embraer E195 at Belgrade in a take-off that should never have started, and Serbian investigators also found gaps in Marathon's own procedures. We score it 77, below Air Serbia (82), the airline it was flying for that day.

The other thing to know is that almost nobody books Marathon. It is a wet-lease company: other airlines rent its jets with pilots, cabin crew, maintenance and insurance, and sell the seats under their own flight numbers.

Who flies with Marathon?

Marathon was set up in Athens in 2017 and received its Greek air operator certificate in December 2020. It began with one business jet and moved into airline flying in 2023. By its own count it has since flown more than 16,000 flights and about one million passengers.

Its clients change every season. Air Serbia was flying a Marathon E195 in early 2024. Lübeck Air, Universal Air in Malta and Blue Islands in the Channel Islands have hired its jets, and in December 2025 an E190 crossed the Atlantic to fly for Aerovías DAP in southern Chile. Aeroitalia, United Nigeria and MedSky Airways have flown Marathon aircraft in their colours. It also flies charters for tour operators, football teams and United Nations relief rotations.

If your booking says "operated by Marathon Airlines", this page is the record that applies to your flight, not the selling airline's.

The Belgrade take-off in 2024

On the evening of 18 February 2024, Air Serbia flight JU324 to Düsseldorf was an E195 registered in Denmark, owned and crewed by Marathon. The crew planned a take-off from intersection D6 on runway 30L, which leaves 2,349 metres of runway. They taxied onto the runway at D5 instead, with only 1,273 metres ahead.

The controller noticed at once, told them the distance, and offered to let them backtrack to D6. The crew recalculated on a tablet, entering the wrong runway direction, and accepted D5. The jet weighed about 45.7 tonnes; Serbia's investigators later worked out that, with the settings the crew used, 34.4 tonnes was the most it could have lifted safely from that point; even with full thrust and the best flap setting, it needed 1,440 metres. The flaps stayed at the setting for the longer runway and the engines at reduced thrust. At 100 knots the crew saw the end coming, kept going, and hit the instrument landing system antenna and approach lights beyond the runway before getting airborne. They circled for about an hour and landed with holes in the fuselage, damage at the left wing root and a fuel leak. All 111 people on board were unhurt. The aircraft was written offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary.

Serbia's Center for Investigation of Accidents in Transport (CINS) issued its final report, dated August 2025. It blamed the take-off from an intersection without enough runway, with poor crew discipline, wrong data entry and weak crew coordination, especially by the captain. It also found that Marathon's operations manual had no procedure for a change of departure point after taxiing and no line-up checklist. Marathon added both during the investigation.

Under our rules the accident counts here, on the airline whose certificate and crew flew the aircraft, not on Air Serbia.

How strong is the oversight?

Marathon holds Greek certificate GR-062, so the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority oversees it under the same EASA rules as Aegean Airlines. Greece is in the FAA's Category 1FAA IASAThe US FAA's check of whether a country's aviation regulator meets ICAO standards. Category 1 means it does; Category 2 means it does not.More in the glossary. Marathon joined the IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary registry in July 2026 and became an IATA member in August.

We score oversight 87, a little below the 90 we give EU airlines with IOSA, because the Belgrade report found that the authority had accepted an operations manual with the two missing procedures, and sent its recommendations to the authority as well as to the airline. The IOSA audit came after the accident and is still new.

What does Marathon fly?

Only Embraer E-Jets, with two seats on each side of the aisle. In October 2026 its fleet page listed four: an E175 from 2011, an E190 from 2009, and two E195s from 2010 and 2015. That makes an average of about 15 years. These are fly-by-wireFly-by-wireA flight control system in which the pilot's inputs go to computers, which then move the control surfaces. Many such systems also stop unsafe manoeuvres.More in the glossary jets with modern cockpits, but the first E-Jet generation, not the newer E2.

Before you fly a Marathon jet

• Read the "operated by" line. The airline that sold your ticket handles your booking and compensation, but Marathon's crew, aircraft and procedures fly you.
• Expect a crew that is new to the route. Wet-lease crews often fly a client's network for one season only. That is normal in the industry, and it is why the procedures Belgrade exposed matter.
• Judge the record by its length. Three years of airline flying with four jets is too little to call a record clean or bad. The one accident is serious enough that we would like to see several quiet years before scoring Marathon with the EU's best.

How we scored it

The accident record (80) is held down by the Belgrade write-offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary in a short history. Oversight (87) is EU-level with IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary, minus the procedure gaps the investigation found. The fleet (64) and the changing airports of wet-lease flying (66) cost the most; the thin incident record scores 78.