Cracking deal for bmi if they don't end up paying too much for it.
Although bmi has been taking A321s out, I can't see why they would want to get rid of the BMed ones if a) they are in medium-haul fit and b) they have a whole new raft of (ex-BMed) routes on which to fly them. The rationale (as I understand it) for bmi to get rid of its A321s was that they didn't work on LHR-AMS, EDI, GLA etc. It is something of an illogical jump to say that because the economics don't make sense on LHR-AMS/EDI/GLA, they therefore don't work on LHR-BEY/AMM/ALY etc.
I thought the BMed A321s had aux fuel tanks fitted which are a bit of a nightmare if you want to operate them in high-density config a la Monarch - didn't think you'd get all of the bags in. Happy to stand corrected on that.
BA franchise agreements have an early termination clause in the event of a hostile change of ownership of the franchisee, and it's hard to see why BD would keep it in place for anything other than a transitional period. Surely they / their Star Alliance partners would want to move the feeder traffic off BA onto their own services - I would suspect that would be one of the compelling reasons to acquire BMed in the first place.
There must also be some scope to plan the whole operation more efficiently using bmi's extensive LHR slot base and by combining the fleets. If I remember rightly, the bmi A320 which does LHR-DME-LHR doesn't do anything else in the day, and is back home by early evening. This could quite easily pick up a BMed evening departure out to the east, and another aircraft arriving in from a BMed route in the morning (using a bmi slot) could pick up the outward DME. Hey presto - one less aircraft needed. I suspect that bmi could probably find that they could save two or three A320/321s through more efficient scheduling of the combined bmi/BMed route networks and slots. Again, compelling logic for the deal; you earn the same revenue but need two less aircraft to do it.
The plus point is that fewer aircraft probably would still need broadly the same number of pilots and cabin crew due to the routes involved.