Alas, this is not MOL throwing his toys out the cot. It is the inevitable result of incompetent management at our regional bases who have fiddled while Rome burnt. We have had only 3 aircraft at EMA for many years and always said there were no grounds for increasing that. In the meantime, Ryanair, BMI Baby and now Jet 2 looked at the same market and disagreed. They have all in the past, or are now in the process of, installing substantial numbers of aircraft there. This base was there for the taking and we sat back and did absolutely nothing. Similar scenes are occurring in BFS, GLA, LPL and EDI. In stark contrast easyJet elected to go big at LGW (over 40 aircraft there this Summer) and it has paid massive dividends. There are some seriously incompetent people in key positions at easyJet who need to be leaving for pastures new. Ryanair, for all its ills, are aggressive, decisive and intuitive about taking on new markets. We at easyJet have instead employed sheep in sheep's clothing who are cautious, indecisive and without direction when it comes to the UK market. Our Flt Ops director, a 'European' himself, knows a lot about Europe, nothing about handling people and even less about the UK market place. Consequently he has allowed our regional bases to suffer through neglect and indecision. That leads us to where we are today. Bizarrely easyJet are frightened of competition and instead of fighting in our core markets are hoping to operate somewhere where no one else is. Such places only exist in the imaginations of our senior managers - there is competition everywhere and the sooner we draw our line in the sand to take them on the better.
Everyone has their part to play here. We need pilots and cabin crew to operate the aircraft, engineers to keep them flying and marketeers to ensure there are passengers to take. Right now, that last group are losing the plot by not providing aircraft in sufficient numbers at our regional bases. This needs to be corrected swiftly.