Ladies and Gents,
Dream on. VS are in a position of serious weakness. They have LHR slots, sure. BUT!!! They never make any consistent profits, they have failed to reach any sort of critical mass and that is everything in airline flying these days (BA/IB/AA or NW/DL or CO/UA if anyone needed persuading of the realities).
VS would love a merger with someone, because let's face it, there's no future as a long haul airline with 35 airplanes and they don't have the cash or profits on existing routes to expand hugely again.
There is quite possibly a second credit crunch coming. The difference with this one will be that the Governments have no money left to help....... hence credit will be extremely limited and financing anything, yet alone airline expansion will be very, very difficult.
I see VS having to surrender control to Lufthansa, and I believe the VS brand (as we know it today) may disappear in the next 10 years.
However, a tie up with eJ would be utterly unworkable without either eJ moving ops to LHR (never happen), or VS moving to, or expanding massively in LGW (see above for reasons why that won't happen).
I give this a 9.5 out of 10 for a bad merger if it happens....
