White Airways

Is White Airways safe?

Mostly, but its record is the weakest of the Lisbon wet-lease airlines. White Airways has never had a fatal accident, it works under European rules, and it holds IATA's 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 audit. But while flying ATR turboprops for TAP Express it damaged two aircraft in hard landings, at Lisbon in 2016 and at Fez in 2018. Portugal's investigators blamed both on crews pressing on with unstable approaches, and the Fez report went further, criticising White's pilot training, its culture and the regulator's oversight of it. We score White 77, below EuroAtlantic Airways (80) and Hi Fly (81).

Today White is small. The only aircraft we can tie to its recent flights is one Airbus A320.

Two hard landings for TAP Express

For years White flew ATR 72-600 turboprops on TAP Express routes from Lisbon and Porto, under TAP flight numbers but on White's certificate and with White's pilots. Under our wet-lease rule those events count here, not on TAP Air Portugal.

On 22 October 2016, flight TP1971 from Porto with 24 people on board approached Lisbon in heavy rain and gusty wind. The ATR touched down hard, bounced, came down hard on its nose gear, which threw off both nose wheels, bounced again and rolled out on the bare nose-gear structure. Nobody was hurt. GPIAAF, Portugal's investigation board, found that the captain decided to force the landing while well above the target approach speed and outside the airline's stabilised-approach limits, and that fatigue may have played a part.

On 6 July 2018, flight TP1428 from Lisbon landed at Fez in Morocco with a trainee co-pilot at the controls, on her first airline type. The approach was unstable, the captain did not order a go-around, and the aircraft hit the runway at 2.88 g, scraping its tail bumper and the skin of the lower fuselage. The captain checked the landing gear on a walk-round, and about an hour later the same aircraft left for Lisbon as TP1427 with 55 passengers. GPIAAF's report, published in December 2019, listed contributing factors at every level: a captain who did not supervise or recover the aircraft, a training process that let a co-pilot with known landing difficulties fly without a safety pilot, no explicit stabilised-approach criteria in White's manuals, an organisational culture with inadequate procedures, and weak oversight of the airline by ANAC, Portugal's aviation authority.

We count both landings in the accident factor. The decision to fly the damaged aircraft back to Lisbon was a separate unsafe act, so it also counts in incidents.

The end of the TAP contract

TAP ended White's ATR contract on 31 October 2022. In its statement, quoted by Presstur, TAP said White's aircraft averaged ten technical groundings a month, that 342 flights were cancelled between November 2021 and September 2022, and that White had 1.9 such groundings per 100 flights against TAP's 0.52. White replied that it was a victim of TAP's choices. Groundings for faults are a reliability problem first, but they are also how maintenance trouble shows up before it becomes a safety one, so we weigh them in the incident factor.

What White flies today

Since 2023 White has flown an Airbus A320. The current one, CS-TSY, was built around 2005, first flew for America West and later for Air Busan, before White registered it in Portugal in 2024. It has carried Azores Airlines passengers, FC Porto's team for Privilege Style, and in October 2026 Cabo Verde Airlines flights between Praia, Sal, São Vicente and Lisbon. White's website also lists a Boeing 737 and a Boeing 777. White once flew a 777-200LR, CS-TQX, for Ceiba Intercontinental of Equatorial Guinea, whose own airlines could not fly to the EU; we found no recent passenger flights on either type.

White belongs to the Omni Aviation group, which also owns the maintenance company Aeromec, and in 2025 it was reported to be studying cargo flights with two A321 freighters.

Who checks White?

ANAC Portugal issues the certificate under EASA rules, Portugal has 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 rating, and White is an IOSA-registeredIOSAThe 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 IATA member. We score oversight 87 instead of 90 because of the Fez report's findings on how the authority oversaw the airline.

Before you fly White Airways

• Check who operates your flight. White mostly flies under other airlines' flight numbers; "operated by White" or the registration CS-TSY on a tracker tells you this page applies.
• Plan around a one-aircraft operation. If the A320 has a fault, there is no spare White jet, so a cancellation or a substitute aircraft from another company is likely; keep a buffer before important onward flights.

How we scored it

Oversight (87) is the strongest factor. The accident record (82: no fatal accident in 15 years and no hull lossHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary) is held low in its band by two damaging hard landings with crew and training causes, and incidents (68) reflect the flight home after Fez and the technical groundings TAP reported. The A320 is about 20 years old (fleet 58), and the network scores 76. Overall 77.