Originally Posted by
Harry Wayfarers
Going back some 6 years a (rich) friend of mine was thinking of starting a 'puddle jumper' airline with a fleet of perhaps Do228's & Do328's, at that time there were petition(s) to keep Plymouth Airport open so that's how he became involved and interested.
I think the reason I'm glad for him that he didn't is that if he had, then even if he had found successful routes, it wouldn't have had the resources to defend (and in some cases operate!) any successful routes that he found.
If we create an imaginary Air PuddleJump at it's finest, greatest and most competitive, it might be have been something like an amalgamation of Manx2, Air Wales, Air Southwest & Scot Airways at their peaks. For the sake of argument we might say that in addition it gained economies of scale in terms of operation and marketing by also finding surprising success in operating flights from Cambridge, Gloucester, Oxford & Shoreham to Edinburgh, Dublin and Amsterdam, and some routes from the Irish regions to the English regions and Scotland.
It would have been in a constant battle to find from these routes that were only exactly the right amount of successful; otherwise other airlines would have been tempted to volunteer to operate them with bigger aircraft instead, in a way that I think has perhaps been the problem best demonstrated by Eastern Airways. I wouldn't really want to be Eastern Airways. It must be stressful at the moment.
In terms of the other suggested exceptions to the rule that small airlines can't survive... Aurigny (govt backed), Loganair (public sector reliant, and whose success Highland Airways wasn't able to recreate perhaps as a result of economies of scale) & Scilly Skybus (no competition; not even all year round by the ferry from the same operator!) are all "different". Lyddair is very unique and not really an example of an airline (and seriously; that plane pictured on their homepage...!).