Originally Posted by
El Bunto
The public shareholders, incidentally, don't have any share in the actual airline. It remains a limited company ( FlyBE Ltd ).
They do have shares in FlyBE Group Plc which is a holding company ( formerly Walker Aviation Ltd ). So they can tell that board what to do, but not the airline management.
The aircraft which are owned directly are registered to FlyBE Ltd, rather than the Group, which could make a sale of that unit quite straiightforward; own aircraft, no public shareholders.
Likewise FlyBE Aviation Services Ltd is a nice tidy little MRO package, complete with a contract for A400 work.
I forsee the individual units being sold-off and the Group fading away into nothingness.
I agree.
I remember Walker when he ran his steel company and moved to Jersey and invested in building Jersey European. Indeed the instructor who sent me solo was later employed as a pilot flying their old twin Otters..
A lot of their business has been built on routes that are just about marginal.
Norwich falls in to that arena.
With the decline in operations in the southern North Sea one has to ask how much longer the regular revenue from oil traffic will support the airport.
If we spool back a few years ago we had this fiasco.
In 2008, in order to avoid losing a £280,000 rebate from Norwich Flybe advertised for "actors", as well as offering free return flights to Dublin on its website.
Eastern,Flybe and Loganair face tough times ahead as do some of the airports they serve.