Originally Posted by
Copenhagen
My heart goes out to the staff, investors and suppliers, who have all lost a great deal today. Mistakes were made, but the economic environment is the main reason they have ceased trading.
The sheer complexity of what they were trying to achieve so quickly led to operational weakness
The difficult, recessionary trading environment kept high yield corporate traffic down and early booking leisure traffic at home.
The political chaos in London and lack of a functioning government in Belfast is killing business sentiment.
So few of their routes had.no competition, so no ability to raise prices. Picking fights against other better funded airlines with established brands is a risk.
Fuel prices
Lots of excuses but it seems mismanagement is the top one. The fleet was just terrible. This morning Twitter is filled with people who say they are owed money for cancelled flights or delay compensation which was promised up to 3 months ago.
The constant tech problems with the fleet must have caused a fortune in compensation payment. On some days they had more cancellations than flights running. That’s without the bizarre route planning cancellations at short notice and launching alternatives with 7 days notice.
We had all this talk that they had enough backing to be able to fly empty for two years before they would struggle. It was also bizarre to reuse the brand that wasn’t great to start with and was trashed after the first failure.
As for the political situation in NI, other carriers are expanding there. Lufthansa, Ryanair and Emerald (who announced they flew more than 1m pax in under a year) so I’m not sure it’s politics.
It’s sad for the staff but hopefully they can find new work quickly. Lots of carriers are recruiting. BACF just opened LCY recruitment and there are many others.