One of the things I don’t understand about Flybe v 2 is why they need to schedule so tightly - I am referring to the comment above about lots of 8 sector days. Traditionally there are 2 basic approaches to scheduling. Either 1/ you have new, very reliable aircraft which you can work hard and which you need to because the fixed cost of the aircraft (lease or whatever) is high and the unit needs to fly a lot of hours to cover these costs or 2/ you use older aircraft which are much cheaper. You don’t therefore need to fly them as hard to cover the fixed cost and instead accept that more of you costs will be variable (hours related maintenance, fuel etc). You accept that these older aircraft will be less reliable than newer aircraft but that’s an acceptable trade off because you can afford a much looser schedule and back up aircraft (the greatest ever exponent of this approach was probably Dan Air with the comet).
So, it’s quite a while since I was actively involved in leasing aircraft but I imagine Dash 8 400s are not expensive (unless lessors perceive Flybe v 2 to be so high risk that they need a very long barge pole to touch them). As such, given that there are clearly a number of contributors to this thread who either work for or have a vested interest in Flybe v 2, could one of them explain exactly why they are pursuing the strange business model of trying to intensively operate cheap, unreliable aircraft rather than going for a more relaxed and thus more reliable schedule?