Twin Aisle is spot on. The excitement of having a load of cheap nasty Dash 8s gracing the hallowed tarmac of CWL is nothing to get excited about. There is not one route from CWL that can bare any kind of competition. Being all emotional about how great CWL is won't change that fact ! Both FlyBe and Baby will not keep Belfast going.
FlyBe are not likely to start a crew base at Cardiff. They don't need to, everything they are interested in taking can be done from the other end or as a W pattern. That means if Baby throw their teddies out of the cot, which there is a very good chance they will !, the LOCAL aviation communtiy will lose. The LOCAL travelling community may gain in the short term but in the long term Twin Aisle is right. You can't operate the long routes unless you've got the short routes to back pack them with. NO EDI and GLA means NO Prague or Faro. Let me tell you for nothing there is absolutely NO WAY Flybe will ever put anything through CWL other than the Q400 BHX, SOU, EXT are much further up the food chain in FLYBE and the very small number of 195s they are having are already allocated. So there will be no extensive FlyBe network.
The CWL management have probably cost CWL the 4th Baby aircraft. The exact phrase used was "We are probably going to have to punish them by putting in BHX". And that was because they let TOM onto some routes that were scheduled by Baby only. As I said there are NO scheduled routes from CWL that will bare competition.
Twin Aisle is right the management need to be a lot smarter. Short term gain will lead to long term loss. As for Globespan good luck with that !