With regards to making London a competitive environment for aviation, merging the operations of bmi and Virgin would be ideal.
The difficulty I have is how such a company would be financed and owned.
SRB is presumably very reluctant to hand over more than 49% control of his baby. Further, I understand Virgin is losing money right now and not in a position to spend a lot of cash on a large acquisition like bmi. Virgin has done a lot of talk about future plans, but as far as I know, have not yet been invited into any of the big 3 alliances - I'm also assuming it'll take well over a year between any possible alliance membership invitation for VS, to having changed all the back office systems and being a member.
As we all know, LH either want out of bmi mainline, or want some strategic change in bmi.
So how does one merge the operations of bmi and Virgin into a functionally (if not legally) single operational airline in a way that keeps both sides happy, given financial constraints ?