Moving away from the IT "bucket and spade" market for a moment, where is the "new" carrier going to appear from that fills the void on many regional business routes that FlyBe are shedding in the present route cull? The history of small regional start-ups isn't great, there is a thread running in the AH+N on failed British carriers, and the number of failed airlines set up to serve business routes from outside of London tends to suggest that, perhaps for a number of reason, not least the concentration of business in London and the southeast of England, the segment simply isn't sustainable. OK, Loganair has stepped in and picked up a number of routes between Scotland and the rest of UK, but are they really equipped to take on routes out of, say, Southampton, Birmingham and Manchester to major mainland European business centres and make a profitable fist of them? Personally, I doubt it.
Post Brexit, the opportunities for groups like Air France / KLM or Lufthansa to move in to the UK are more limited (given ownership rules possibly impossible), so perhaps the best hope is for those European groups to serve the UK regions with their own in house carriers, such as Air Dolomiti, Austrian or Brussels Airlines.
More far fetched, would Jet2 see opportunities for developing less leisure orientated routes such as BHX or MAN to Milan or Berlin, perhaps bringing in a small fleet of E-jets?
Or, are business passengers from the Midlands northwards to be expected to do all their flying over hubs, be they LHR, AMS, BRU or CDG? Is that really the only way forward?
More questions than answers I'm afraid!