Monarch has been a more than 50% scheduled airline for over a decade now and is currently more like 80% scheduled, with more scheduled routes, including winter ski, being added all the time. The idea that we have "just" decided to go scheduled is thus rather wide of the mark. A charter flight is by definition profitable (as long as you can add up) as you sell the aircraft for a fixed price when it is hired which covers your costs (including fuel price increases between signing the contract and flying the sectors) - it is then up to the charterer to recover its costs. However, over the last 10 years there has been less charter business around - from the tour operators' point of view, why take the risk chartering a whole aeroplane when you can just buy a block of scheduled seats?
As has been said the numbers of pilots an airline employs is rather meaningless as it is "Full Time Equivalents" that is the important number - many of our pilots are either 75% or 50% of full time or employed on part-year working with some of the winter months off, which other than for a limited quota of new joiners is at the pilot's own choice. If you look at the CAA produced figures Monarch compares pretty favourably with the rest in terms of crew efficiency. 700 to 800 hours a year is typical on the SH FBW fleet, and pilots regularly choose to breach the 90 hours a month contractual limit in return for overtime payments. Given that we are not the worst payers in the industry, this must mean that they like coming to work!
In terms of Shareholder investment, why would a private business be afforded a cash injection of any amount if there was not a vision that there was money to be made in the longer term? No company can rest on its laurels and assume that because it has been around for 45 years it will always be there - the airline business, of all businesses, has no respect for past heritage and it is the hard numbers that count. Nevertheless, over that 45 years Monarch has quietly adapted to change, usually under other airlines' radars, the transition to scheduled flights being a prime example where most observers simply haven't noticed. All this whilst quietly pioneering new technology such as the B757 to cite an old example and fitting Class 2 EFBs to its aircraft as a more recent one.
Monarch is not afraid to take on the competition, and where it does it usually wins market share until it is the most popular airline on that route. We have moved to take over some of the Baby routes from EMA, but notice that this is a small fraction of the total routes that Baby flew. Our operations in the Baby/Jet2 part of the UK in Birmingham and Manchester (where we are the largest operator bar none) have been very successful, and we look forward to growing those businesses in a measured way and taking on new bases where this is prudent. Far from being a "reckless" expansion it is simply taking advantage of the market as it presents itself, leaving other airlines trailing in its wake, and incidentally those airlines have made no secret that they are pretty hacked off about it, as has been evidenced in part here I suspect.
A recession means you have to do what you have been doing well better, cut out the dead wood and become more efficient, advertise to keep your customers doing what they know they really want to, and treat your competitors with the utmost respect whilst trying to pinch their business!
