Flybe-V1

[davidjohnson6]

S1F - I'm going to counter your argument. The shareholders of Flybe have been wiped out. The creditors will likely see a few pence in the pound if anything. The management and staff have (almost) all received a P45. While the staff might well be hired in non-flying jobs, the senior managers are likely to find their CVs are tainted. What remains now is just a legal framework with various licences and rights, as well as a (very) small number of employees to ensure compliance with continued retention of those licences. What the shell company does have, is a lot of systems, procedures / policies and software, which are necesary to make an airline work. Essentially we are left with plumbing, but plumbing that, critically, is known to operate effectively at scale, subject to a suitable business model
If Flybe were left to liquidation, then all the plumbing gets sent to landfill

If Cyrus are just trying to get their hands on the slots, sell them on, and then shut down the company anyway, then I agree this is one of the undesirable parts of capitalism - essentially people getting their hands on things without having worked fairly to earn them
However.... if there is a genuine desire to restart an airline, then it seems wasteful in a society to throw away all the plumbing if it can be reused. Furthermore, by selling the assets, the creditors get to recover a bit more of the money they were owed. The shareholders of course still lose all their money, and the senior managers are unlikely to be rehired, so those who caused the company to decline over the years don't get rewarded for failure

An analogy might be a house that is in disrepair and was repossessed because the previous owner couldn't pay the mortgage. Do you demolish the house and just sell a bare plot of land, or do you sell it to a builder who knows how to fix the leaky roof and install a new kitchen, in the knowledge that the builder will make a big pile of money when selling the house in 12 months time to another buyer ?