Originally Posted by
trustjephius
We are a small start-up airline which will be serving only one route to start with (UK-Zim).
I’ll answer some of your sarcastic comments.
1. yes we are fully registered and compliant with aviation authorities
2. although the offices are based in Greater Manchester, our UK airport is likely to be Stansted or Gatwick but we are still researching as each airport has different costs and taxes etc. Another airport could be Birmingham as it’s more accessible to a lot more people or even Manchester with it being more or less central to make it easy for people to get there. And the parking situations are much better than the London airports.
3) definitely not a school project unless your schools do projects in the millions of pounds (!)
We aim to start flying late October realistically and are partnered with Airbus as our consulting firm.
See you at ZimFest 2025 as we are sponsoring and are also the proud and are officially their travel partner.
I don't think the comments were necessarily sarcastic but as you undoubtedly know there have been many failed attempts at the setting up the kind of operation that you describe. In recent years were have had FlyPop and Hans Airways that have got as far as acquiring aircraft but not managed to gain an AOC or fly a revenue service. Then there is the notorious Global Airlines, subject of a very long and interesting thread here. They have acquired an aircraft then had it registered to HiFly and sort of operated a couple of revenue services even though in reality they were only charters.
Is it therefore unsurprising that their a more than a small degree of scepticism here, particularly those contributors who have "already been there and got the T-shirt"?
I am interested to learn if your intention is to operate as an airline, with all the licences that such an operation requires, or as a "virtual airline" where your business sells seats via an agent and charters the aircraft from an ACMI operator such as HiFly. To be honest I really do doubt the viability of operating to anywhere else than London, but of course you have to do your research to establish where your market is. I assume it is going to be steeped in VFR traffic, so you need to be flying to where most of your passengers want to go, which as with most markets in UK is London so flying to BHX, much as though it is logistically easy to reach London still isn't London. Even less so Manchester.