Originally Posted by
ManUtd1999
A bit of a long shot - but would Virgin Atlantic not be interested in BMI Regional (obviously presuming IAG cant influence who gets it?). If, and its a big if, they can get enough slots at Heathrow, a fleet of Embraers could easily serve a domestic and northern european route network to feed the long-haul routes. With lower operating costs than the Airbus they might even be able to compete directly with BA.
I honestly don't think this would work.
The slots are the big sticking point, and "if" regional airlines could get slots in Heathrow, a lot of things would be different.
But going beyond that: Virgin's yields are not where they need to be, even for point to point traffic. For connecting traffic e.g. continental Europe to US or Africa, they would be competing with the European home carriers' direct services as well as with a variety of other connecting options, all on established carriers through established hub operations using larger aircraft with much lower per-seat cost than Embraers. In other words, their connecting yields would be even lower than their point-to-point yields. These economics just wouldn't work on higher-seat-cost aircraft like the Embraer.
BD feed to VS is not minimal, it's true. But VS's LHR schedule is spread throughout the day, so the feed is from those routes which (a) have relatively high frequency and (b) have relatively few long-haul connections of their own (DUB, EDI, perhaps MAN). New continental European points are unlikely to meet either of these criteria.
And perhaps a further reason why VS would not be interested: they are as poor as a church mouse and can absolutely not afford a loss-making expansion initiative.
Here's an idea for a (perhaps?) more rational VS expansion: VS could make a play for the LHR slots which the competition regulators will tell IAG to divest, which IMHO will be specific to the LHR-EDI and LHR-MAN routes (as well as perhaps Moscow, Cairo, etc.). They could find an existing A320/737-family operator interested in taking on a Virgin franchise to operate those two domestic routes (and maybe Moscow?) out of LHR. Result: Virgin keeps their feed and grows their network with no cash-out to them - on the contrary, they get a franchise fee. And some other operator gets to use the Virgin brand (and existing BD-VS feed traffic) without having to build their own brand.
C.