Acbus, hardly a "wait and sell" plan....they've been busy integrating the mainline business into LH for the last 18 months, and waiting to sell at a time the biggest annual loss is about to be made, a new res and inventory system is about to be implemented at great cost and are in the midst of upgrading on board product is hardly smart. They genuinely thought they could turn it around with their usual strategy of reduce capacity, extract cost synergies and throw the weight of the LH sales machine behind it before expanding once profits start to flow(as per Swiss, and in due course OS). What has happened is that time has run out to turn it around, indeed they probably realise it can never make a sensible return on the capital invested and have to get out at almost any cost rather than burn more cash for years to come. The truth is that there is a structural strategic problem with the mainline business which has existed for many years and was disguised until 2008 by the JV with LH and SAS which passed 90% of the losses back to them. It's too small to compete with BA as a network carrier and the old domestic and short haul Euro market has been decimated by lo-cost and train. Personally I don't think that anyone could have made money with bmi over recent years and it is only BA who can make a reasonable case for why it makes sense to them now. It might have been better if the JV had never existed and the consolidation that was needed had happened earlier when the business was still in reasonable shape.