Other routes:Aer Lingus has denied claims that it planned to axe some flights between Cork and London Heathrow.
The airline blamed a computer glitch for the disappearance from its website of early-morning flights from Cork to Heathrow and a late-night return flight.
For a time this week, customers were unable to make bookings from next March on the 7.30am outward flight and the 10.15pm return flight from Heathrow, prompting fears in Cork that its connections with London were to be curtailed in similar fashion to Shannon's.
However, an airline spokeswoman said next year's schedule had been incorrectly loaded on to the reservation system featured on the website. There was never any intention to alter the schedule and the error had since been corrected.
When the missing flights were restored to the website, the indicated fare prices rose four-fold for a time, but the spokeswoman said this was also a glitch and had been corrected as part of the updating of the system.
Meanwhile, Aer Lingus says it now hopes to carry almost a quarter of its passengers facing disruption during next week's pilots' strike on hired-in aircraft.
The company aims to carry up to 10,000 out of the 55,000 passengers booked on hundreds of flights over the 48-hour period if the strike goes ahead.
Five return flights a day will operate on the Dublin-Heathrow route, three between Dublin and Manchester and Dublin and Malaga, and two between Cork and Heathrow. One return flight each will operate on Dublin-Faro and Shannon-Heathrow.
Aer Arann said yesterday it would change the booking of any customer who was connecting to an Aer Lingus flight during the disruptions free of charge.
