Gone bump, passengers told not to turn up at Birmingham airport
I wonder how many of our sponsors over the years have gone bust?
I did not realise they were co-founded by Jack Walker.
I thought they went years ago tbh
They did but they relaunched with new backers.
Small fleet, running on busy enough routes with flimsy inconvenient timetables for more money than their competitors on worse aircraft.
Was never going to last.
This iteration lasted less than 12 months.
There's obviously some demand for regional flights in the UK but very few airlines can make it work. It's a shame as the Dash 8s and the ATR 72s are great planes to fly in for short hops.
Massive blow for BHX too.
I used to use Flybe quite a lot from Inverness until they pulled out of there, now easyJet have the Scotland-->England route all seen up.
Unless His Majesty is paying in which case I'll take BA from Aberdeen please 🙂
I flew Flybe to the Edinburgh fringe last year, but have booked EasyJet for this year.
All airlines are struggling to make money at the moment. I flew Virgin Atlantic back from Boston to Heathrow on Monday and there were just 41 people on a brand new A330neo. Madness.
I had work flights booked to Amsterdam in a couple of weeks. The slightly different times Vs KLM were really handy for meetings.
Shame they've gone but it's obviously completely viable if they've gone twice in about 2 years.
Why do I always get the full flights? Since March last year I have flown BA to Bahrain, Istanbul, Catania and Mumbai. All eight flights full, business and economy.
It's a shame about FlyBe. A good airline with a great fleet.
A good opportunity to do away with UK internal flights altogether. No justification for taking planes given the distances involved.
No chance I’m driving or getting a train to Glasgow or Edinburgh, thank you very much
It’s not that ridiculous, flying does make little sense normally for all but the longest domestic journeys in the UK especially if you’re travelling city to city rather than somewhere outside of a city.
Given the choice and a reliable rail network I will always choose to take the train Birmingham-Scotland even if it’s up to around 50% more expensive than a flight. Air travel is stressful and involves a lot of waiting around and inconvenient travel to/from airports at either end.
But given the current cost of petrol and the unreliability of the train network there should be a healthy market for domestic air travel in this country.
It just seems that BA has all of the business travel sorted out of Heathrow, Gatwick and LCY to the north of England and Scotland; and EasyJet has the more leisure/cost conscious market sorted elsewhere. Even Ryanair struggle to compete with EasyJet domestically.
I do think there is a market for small aircraft, highish frequency routes out of Birmingham to Scotland and Belfast with an established airline (and I think Aer Lingus Regional with their ATRs would be the perfect fit) but a re-start-up, historically loss making airline like Flybe isn’t the one for the job.
Flybe could’ve worked if it had just focussed on longer legs between big cities with low fares and decent frequency but the market for routes like Southampton-Aberdeen or Manchester-Newquay doing one round trip every day must be tiny. They even did Manchester-Scotland which is farcical it’s a two and a half hour train ride.