bmibaby will not base additional aircraft at Cardiff if the airline can make more money, or seize more opportunities from another base. At the moment, BHX is the focal point for bmibaby, as the airline has a lot of potential market to gain from the flybe-BA Connect merger, and sadly this means that other bases are having the brakes put on them. We can all see the reasons why WW ought to expand from Cardiff, there is very little direct competition on some core routes, serving one of the UK's most exciting cities. The sad thing is, under bmi management we are heavily under-resourced and under-funded, we don't have the same mass expansion power that bigger carriers like EZY or RYR have, thus if they can afford to keep CWL at it's present size they will.
I wouldn't be surprised to see flybe or Thomsonfly take advantage of this situation over the next year, as they serve very different markets that encompass the bmibaby route network. Flybe do well on point-to-point business routes (Scotland, Northern Ireland and France) whilst Thomsonfly's market are holiday spots (like the Costas, Portugal, Italy, Canaries) increasingly being flown at scheduled like frequencies. Combined, they could easily push bmibaby out of the market.
Whilst it's been about two years since I was last down at CWL, the base always had fantastic local crews, and the aviance staff were excellent as well. How is handling at CWL these days?