Originally Posted by
Colonel_Klink
The idea isn’t that post administration the airline has 70 aircraft flying....its more that the airline will have 70 aircraft available for it to ramp up operations over ‘x’ amount of months.
I think the number of aircraft Virgin retain will be solely dependant on how successful lease renegotiations were - the more ‘power by the hour’ leases they were able to renegotiate, the more aircraft there will be.
I find it very unlikely that Bain would fork out the money they have to buy an airline of 40 737s.
My money is on 60-75 737s.....hoping for the latter, expecting something closer to the former.s
One article said the idea was for Bain to be flying around 40 B737s but have more on hand so that if one goes tech they can swap in another because Bain's research said that OTP and reliability of schedule etc was super-important, and of course Bain would also be looking at how domestic travel and even NZ is going to come back but this will happen through to 2021, so they can't just settle for a 'baseline' fleet and then need to go out and lease more B737s every other month, especially the way that demand can do up and down as we've seen with MEL and now SYD.
I figured they would hang onto all the B737s they own, which is around 40 I think I read somewhere, and then add to this the best value leased B737 leased deals. As Virgin had probably that many leased B737s again and from a wide number of leasing firms they can probably shop around the leasing agents, maybe preference the newest B737s for greater reliability, and just cut the best deal to keep those extra B737s in the fleet, so maybe add another 10-20 to the 40 they own and they have a fleet of 60-70 all up.