FLybe arn't.
Loganair and scottish economics of island flights are neither here nor there.
If you book a week in advance it comes down to under 200 and if your on the air discount scheme that will be even cheaper. The on the day price will only mainly hit goverment, NHS and utilitys and MOD. They have done the standby tickets thing in the past years ago and all the locals never buy a ticket and you just end up with a plane full of standby tickets and huge q's in the terminals and an utter ball ache with baggage working out which ones go and which stay. And the added hassel of having screaming PAX in the terminal begging to get on because there relative is about to die in Glasgow Royal for the 20th time that year.
The price of the flights has been spoken about as long as I can remember back to the days of pissing money into the wind with the first oil boom.
I suspect the Saab will be about 2100 an hour to operate.
Which at 200 quid a head return would bring it to 18 pax just to break even.
You could drop the aircraft size but to be honest the next size down would be the J41 but they would cost about the same but you would loose 7 seats and you would still need the cabin crew and you wouldn't be able to get get wheel chair pax onboard.
Loganair's model has been working for years and they are recruiting pilots.
If you wanted to go by a none air route to Benbecular it would be 80 quid return. So for 120 quid you are getting back 16 hours of your life.
You would leave at 12 lunchtime and get in at 22:10 and the return would be leaving at 7am and arriving at 14:20. And the ferry is canceled more often than flights and the ferry doesn't run every day of the week.
But if you look at a train from Glasgow to London the travel time is 5 hours.
About 130 quid return looking at booking a return next week for 7 days.
So you rock up to the airport an hour before departure. Its 1.5 hour sector and 30mins-hour clearing Gatwick so the train is still down by 1.5hours but you don't have to contend with the gatwick express at some highly expensive rate or the slow train into the center of town which can be an hour plus. You can take your own food and drink, leave your phone on while departing the station and more to the point nobody gives a toss if you have a rechargable battery in your bag or are reading your kindle.
Flybe to do the same route is the same price but with a connection in the middle. Easy is 10 quid cheaper but direct.
Before APD it was cheaper to fly now its comparable, the timings from most large population centers are virtually the same give or take 30mins. But you don't have to endure the airport experence at either end and in general train stations are right in the public transport systems which many airports arn't.
Basically anywhere south of EDI/GLA internal in the UK its alot more even playing field. To the north the time penalty for not going by air quite quickly puts rail out for most. I would take a train to be honest these days if I was paying myself. Work wise I tend to be trying to get to airports so flying makes sense.
If the route involves crossing water or is over 1:30 its more than likely going to be be better flying. Multi hop forget it fly into europe first.
More to the point though the Eastern model starts becoming more economical and flybe won't have the cash to see them off on routes previously contested like they did before. Punters do like the Eastern product and for all easterns faults they did have spare aircraft kicking around and the customer experence was pretty good considering the aircraft they ran especially in the J32 days.
There are going to be a few regional operators rubbing there hands and hatching plans to apply pressure.
So I suspect this is just round one and in someways the ones first out the door are going to be at an advantage to the ones that follow. If its last in first out at least they will still be inside 3 years on previous type ratings. As I can see there is going to be issues with folk going out the door with only a month or two left on there IR's. Personally if I was going to the sim for an OPC I would be asking the TRE to generate the LPC paper work every 6 months.