STP
“a KA employee was a Cathay employee”
A KA employee was a KA employee, with KA being part of the Cathay Group.
“we had the same wonderful "hub", safety department, personel, aircrew management, crew room etc”
CX/KA/LD/UO shared group items, like Group Safety and Group assets like buildings and aircraft, KA had their own flight ops management and own aircrew management. The livery painted on the side of an aircraft had no relationship to ownership. When the Group took over KA, KA assets became Group assets, many leases were renegotiated, many KA leased aircraft left, many CX aircraft changed their livery.
“So following your analogy, with CX taking over the KA aircraft and routes, the KA staff should have been taken on to continue the flights on the CX AOC and Cathay Pacific brand if we were to follow precedence in (European) history and your analogy.”
“Ok, so OpenSkies formally operated under Level, which actually entered insolvency during COVID.”
LEVEL France continued to operate under the OpenSkies AOC which was setup by BA however was marketed as LEVEL, just like Cathay Dragon continued to operate under the KA AOC with a change of marketing. LEVEL Europe the Austrian AOC went insolvent, the Spanish LEVEL AOC is still operating (
https://www.flylevel.com/). These were all part of the IAG group, however staff in one part of the IAG Group had no expectation or obligation to be redeployed elsewhere in the Group.
“But CX is currently swinging (ex-KA repainted?) 330s and soon A321NEOs left, right and center to beautiful places such as WUH, XMN and CTU and has been doing it for a while along with BLR, CCU, KHH, HAN and KTM.”
All KA operated flights also carried CX flight numbers, eg KA311 to Busan also carried the CX5311 flight number. CX was already approved, and operated those routes, it didn’t need to do that in aircraft painted in CX livery. This was no big secret, both flight numbers were on the monitors at HKIA, you would have walked past this millions of times without a second thought.
Sit back and think about how KA and UO would have been compared to justify the purchase of UO instead of expanding KA and what UO brought to the Group. UO has approvals do everything KA could do, plus more, at less than half of the KA cost base. Unlike KA, they were already operating NEOs.[
KA never operated or owned the A321NEOs, they were ordered by the Group (
https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/pres...-aircraft.html), the Group had already announced that half of the A321NEO order would going to UO well before KA was closed. That was a indication to me where the Group wanted to expand its operations well before KA was closed.
COVID may have been the accelerant, looking at how things have unfolded, it would appear to me that the closure of KA was part of the longer-term Group plan, I think KA lost its relevance to the Group when UO was purchased and the training ban finished.