Once again a lot of what niknak says is sensible, except that little nugget of misinformation in the middle.
Many of you (including him) have pointed out that Humberside's strength is in charters - it is what the populace seem to want. Any proposed charter is nearly booked solid before the season starts. Excel based aircraft (06) was on exclusively charter duties, with large numbers of seats booked before they even announced that they would no longer base one in 07. Most, if not all, have been picked up by the other operators on W rotations, so to say that Excel left because of lack of pax is fallacious (in the same way as saying it was down to lack of Cat II ILS). It is important to differentiate between lack of pax on daily repetitive schedules in large aircraft and weekly charter flights to popular holiday destinations.
If anything, re-organisation at Excel bringing about a last-in first-out "chop" is the most likely explanation. Note: they have also chopped the CWL based aircraft.