An emergency fleet of aircraft is being organized to rescue more than 150,000 stranded holidaymakers after the sudden collapse of the world’s oldest travel company, Thomas Cook.

The company operates more than 100 passenger jets and announced early Monday that it had gone into administration after the failure of last-minute talks.

It served destinations ranging from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, the US and Caribbean.

READ: Low oxygen bottles prompt Cathay to upgrade security, inform police.

Also affected are almost 22,000 jobs worldwide, including 9,000 in the UK.

A statement on the CAA’s website said the company had ceased trading and all flights were canceled.

It said it was organizing a repatriation program for the stranded customers, dubbed Operation Matterhorn, to operate over the next two weeks.

The number of stranded passengers is almost twice the number involved in the previous biggest peacetime repatriation program after the 2017 collapse of Monarch Airlines.

“News of Thomas Cook’s collapse is deeply saddening for the company’s employees and customers, and we appreciate that more than 150,000 people currently abroad will be anxious about how they will now return to the UK,’’ said UK CAA chief executive Richard Moriarity.

“The government has asked us to support Thomas Cook customers on what is the UK’s largest-ever peacetime repatriation.

“We have launched, at very short notice, what is effectively one of the UK’s largest airlines, involving a fleet of aircraft secured from around the world.

“ The nature and scale of the operation means that unfortunately some disruption will be inevitable. We ask customers to bear with us as we work around the clock to bring them home.”

The Guardian newspaper reported that it understood airlines including British Airways and easyJet would be involved in the airlift.

The aviation authority warned customers in the UK who had not yet traveled not to go to the airport and others to continue their holiday.

It said it would endeavor to get people home as close as possible to their planned dates but warned some disruption was inevitable.

“Passengers in a small number of destinations may return on alternative commercial flights, rather than directly through the Civil Aviation Authority’s flying program,” it added.

Details of the repatriation program are available on a dedicated website, http://thomascook.caa.co.uk/.  The high volume of traffic on the website meant it had crashed at the time this story had published.

The death of the ailing 178-year old company came after lengthy talks to broker a deal to save it.

The company had secured a £900m ($US1.12m) rescue deal led by major shareholder Fosun in August but was unable to meet a recent demand from bankers to raise a further £200m in contingency funding.

Thomas Cook chief executive Peter Frankhauser said in a statement that management had worked exhaustively in the past few days to resolve the outstanding issues.

“Although a deal had been largely agreed, an additional facility requested in the last few days of negotiations presented a challenge that ultimately proved insurmountable,” he said

“It is a matter of profound regret to me and the rest of the board that we were not successful,” he said.

“I would like to apologize to our millions of customers, and thousands of employees, suppliers and partners who have supported us for many years.”

Passengers with future Thomas Cook packaged holidays will be able to reclaim a refund through the UK’s ATOL financial protection scheme.

Passengers currently overseas may also make claims for the cost of replacing ATOL protected parts of their trip, or for out of pocket expenses as a result of delayed flights home.

The BBC said CAA staff had been contacting hotels accommodating packaged holiday customers to tell them the cost of their accommodation would be covered by ATOL.

The Civil Aviation Authority said it would be launching a service to manage all refunds by September 30, “once the flying operation has progressed”.

“This refunds service will seek to process all refunds within 60 days of full information being received,” it said.

The business was founded by cabinet-maker Thomas Cook in 1841 to provide working-class people in Leicestershire local excursions that provided educational excursions as an alternative to drinking.

A new investigation by the New York Times has placed some blame for the two 737 MAX crashes on pilot training and inexperience.

The author of the article is William Langewiesche a former national correspondent for The Atlantic and international correspondent for Vanity Fair. He grew up in aviation and got his start as a pilot before turning to journalism.

READ: Vietnam Airlines pilots fail to lower landing gear.

Langewiesche wrote of Lion Air, that the Indonesian airline whose 737 MAX crashed on October 29, killing all 189 people on board that “Lion Air is an aggressive airline that dominates the rapidly expanding Indonesian market in low-cost travel. It is known for hiring inexperienced pilots and for paying them little and working them hard.”

Langewiesche added: “The captain, an Indian national named Bhavye Suneja, 31, was put in charge of piloting the 737 sooner than he would have been at “a more conventional airline. And once that 737 Max was having issues, the Lion Air crew didn’t mitigate the failures.”

The lack of experience of the pilots and issues with training was highlighted first by this website. 

A stark example was Suneja’s lack of experience when he told air traffic control that he didn’t know the plane’s altitude.

Last year Frank Caron, who was brought in as Lion Air’s safety manager from 2009 to 2011 on orders from insurance firms, told the New York Times that the airline had an average of one major engineering issue every three days, even though most of its fleet was new.

“Buying all the latest‑generation, state‑of‑the‑art engineering will be in vain if you don’t have systems in place that prioritize safety,” he told the NYT.

Caron said that pilot logbooks drastically understated the number of hours pilots actually worked.

“What I saw was a company, from the top down, that made saving money a motto — so spend the minimum on pilot training, salaries, management, everything,” he said.

Caron told Reuters that “safety is much more than running concepts and procedures, safety is a spirit, a state of mind, a way of thinking, an attitude in the daily aspects of operational life.

“And that is precisely what Lion never got. They would say, ‘the airline has 250 flights a day, it is not abnormal that you have accidents.’”

After the 2013 Bali crash, Lion Air co-founder Rusdi Kirana told media when asked about the airline’s poor safety record: “If we are seen to have many accidents, it’s because of our frequency of flights.”

Caron told Reuters that he left Lion Air after some of his safety recommendations were not implemented.

Lion Air rejected all of Caron’s claims.

Emirates airline has released a stunning image of one of its A380s lounges done out in bling.

Last year, the airline displayed a 777 covered in bling, although it was just an impression of how the plane would appear.

Now it has taken the jewels (bling) inside with the “Diamond” A380 onboard lounge.

READ: Vietnam Airlines crew fail to lower undercarriage. 

The work is from Sara Shakeel, who is dentist-turned-artist from Pakistan.

Miss Shakeel superimposes crystals and diamonds on to everyday items such as coffee cups, bathtubs and even animals.