The lowcostroutes.com website linked to above has the following details
but also has this - with no mention of Southend to Newquay...

Worrying times indeed. Swift action needs taken to rebuild investor confidence.

Swift action may mean a change of leadership to steady investor confidence and that ANY plan will have substance behind it and be achievable and deliverable for the good of the shareholders... They will be circling for casualties that they can blame for losses... it's a shi$$y world we live in but they are faceless and don't really care about personalities, they just want an ROI for the institutions they have sold the stock for and anyone's head is better than theirs!

Now that Ryanair are recruiting turboprop captains and first officers, I suspect some may jump. Ryanair's ad stresses their financial stability.

I wonder if flyBe can actually shrink to profitability? I don't think any airline has successfully done that in history. I agree with statements that flyBe needs to concentrate on 'core' routes - what are these though? Although markets like MAN and BHX are mentioned, are they really making money flying a 76 seat jet to MXP when easyJet are on the same route and FR are flying up to twice daily to Bergamo. It might be better to serve the smaller regional airports - if you can avoid competing with yourself.
In any case flyBe have long had a problem competing with peers. They couldn't do it at Gatwick, have had a few stabs a LCY and are also at LHR. If flyBe want to improve the per-seat costs of the Q400 fleet they could install an extra 6-8 seats, but fundamentally flyBe needs to decide what kind of airline it wants to be and to stick with it. "Faster than Road or Rail" seemed a good idea and implied that although flyBe may be more expensive than other modes, flying would be quicker - maybe.

There are ongoing recent rumours that Flybe are set to announce 3 new routes from City of Derry Airport in N.Ireland to Manchester Birmingham and Stansted.

They needed to get a better deal at MAN for this to happen.
I long stopped using Flybe to fly MAN-EDI. & MAN-SOU purely because using MAN T3 this summer, you didn't know whether security would take 5 minutes or two hours. Added to the hassle of drop off and pick up congestion, or the use of remote drop off makes a 40 minutes flight uncompetitive to the alternatives.

Now if part of T3 actually turned into a domestic terminal for quick and easy entry/exit it might make the "Faster than Road or Rail" more viable.
MAN is a major hub for Flybe but the set up in T3 has done it no favours IMHO.

I agree, MAN T3 is a woefully over-crowded space. I'm sure that if flyBe wanted to that they could organise fast-track security for their passengers at MAN. But they don't, even for full-fare 'all in' tickets. Fast track is available at other airports for 'all in' ticket holders. Hopefully with the MAN TP some airlines will be decanted to the new T2 and/or space made available in T1.

Summer 2019 timetable
 

Seems to be some odd Sachs for next summer. Looking at exeter.. It looks like one route is . Edin--exe then goes to Belfast then back to exeter. Then exe--edin....odd!?. Paris is twice dailey.winter only then back to once from summer starts.same for amsterdam.

Anyone think a takeover is likely? If so, who are the likely candidates? Share price continues to fall....

Or wait for them to go bust and then cherry pick what they want. They did exactly that with monarch.

I doubt there's even a single route of Flybe that would appeal to BA.

This is the post I most agree with re the events of the last few days. Every business needs a profitable core which provides a fallback position in difficult times and a springboard in better times. It feels as if flyBe has a lot of activities which wash their face when times are good but struggle in adverse conditions. Their best chance would be if the big boys decided they were better off franchising some feeder routes out rather than doing them themselves -- as with the old BA Connect services flyBe run out of Manchester and Birmingham. That might give a stable base to build around. But it would have to be genuinely seamless partnership in terms of check in, ground facilities etc. I was quite shocked a while back at Manchester that you couldn't check in at the empty flyBe desk for an AF flight to Paris, 'see that queue over there sir'. Maybe another category is routes which are near-commercial which there are public interest arguments for providing stability of support. We've seen over the last forty years the space occupied by flyBe is a declining market--- slot scarcity at the hubs, rail improvements, locos, APD, increased transit times through busy airports are just some of the factors. It's a tough old world out there and that's without making too many corporate mistakes.

Cornishsimon,
Is there a need to refer to Aer Lingus in this way?
The airline has achieved more than most others, surviving the most stealth of competition from Ryanair, while sustainanly growing its network. Newquay has been well supported by the Aer Lingus brand, and has equally opened up North America from Newquay.
EI-BUD
​​​​​

Could be opportunity for Virgin Atlantic to setup a short haul airline?

No long haul airline will touch regional flying. It carry's way more risk and substantially higher fixed costs in support and crewing for a lot less return. Those that do still have a regional setup its run as a loss maker to get pax to the long haul hub. Most I suspect would happily get rid of it these days but the short term cost of redundancy's etc make the accountants leave it until another day.

As you state though if the lack of connectivity hits the loads for the log haul network then they might consider doing something through a separate entity. I suspect though in the UK the additional traffic from regional airports would not warrant the expense. The reason why flybe is struggling is the lack of traffic and the competition of other forms of transport. Realistically quiet a few regional airports are uneconomic and routes out of them are thin and barely cost covering. If the punters are given a choice they will save 10 quid.

Strange that you should take umbrage at a derogatory term (correctly in my opinion) and then use your own derogatory phrase in your rebuttal. Many of those teenage plane spotters were not spotty and many of them progressed into the aviation industry so it ill behoves us to be so dismissive when we need all the support we can get.

Is the dive in share price actually cause for genuine concern or is this just a reaction to events. On the surface it would make worrying reading or are they too big to fail now and someone will bail them out. Surely the core business must be basically sound.

One area flybe seems to shy away from is charging for excess hand baggage. I regularly see passengers with up to four items unchallenged at the gate and once onboard the crew rarely offload bags to the boot. This seems madness as other loco airlines make millions at this. Maybe flybe fear losing passengers by being strict but considering many routes have zero competition why not make some profit? I have even heard of refunds being issued to those that have been charged when they get onboard to find the person next to them has a bigger bag than what they were charged for. Madness!

Nice purple roses or purple dahlias perhaps

RE: airsouthwest. I really don't expect her surviving,if the share price falls any further I can see that being a being a catalyst for forcing her out.

I hope the Board of Directors has a plan around this. Share price halving in a week is most definitely not a good thing, but there also needs to be someone who can play the role of CEO full time rather than just doing it in their spare time.

Whenever a new management team takes over, they usually write off lots of the capital expenditure of the previous team, so that they can make results going forward look better. It's called kitchen sinking. I wonder if there's some of this going on?

Well, they brought in a new Director of IT and he signed them up to Amadeus and has already been ejected. This will have cost them in implementations fees, training and anyone who's used Amadeus previously should know that they are the masters of "nickel and diming" as the Americans call it. Unfortunately, their nickel and diming tends to start with a 5-figure number and escalate alarmingly quickly from there. No cost savings to be had there, quite the opposite.

As I understand it from some insiders and former insiders, Saad did some good but was impossible to work with and his departure was only a matter of time.

The "new" CEO is difficult (nearly impossible) to work with and mercurial in temperament.

The Director of IT has walked - only a few weeks before a major transition to Amadeus, probably the biggest IT project in the airline's history - following a row with her.

There is now a complete case of "press-on-itus" - which the CRM instructors spend hours instructing Captains to avoid - from those now running the IT transition. It may work out OK, it may not.

The real question is who goes first - the Chairman or the CEO?

A really good article I thought only a couple of months ago. Gave a great insight into some of the changes gone on and I really thought they had sailed the storm that was present. https://www.aerosociety.com/news/fly...egional-roots/

From a user perspective, their current system is old, outdated and not particularly user friendly. Amadeus can offer a wide variety of options tailored to the carrier. I'm not entirely sure how it will benefit BE, but quite a few Airlines are now using it in some form. In the UK I know BA and MT do. Other carriers include KL/AF, LH, SAS and many many more. It may not be something that is urgently required but i'm sure as a long term investment it will be a good thing.

Wow the share price has taken a tumble, when trading closed it was at 14.30p

I suspect trimmed you would be better using the word pruned.

currently they have

• Aberdeen
• Belfast
• Birmingham
• Cardiff
• Doncaster
• Dusseldorf
• Edinburgh
• Exeter
• Glasgow
• Manchester
• Southampton

As bases, I suspect at least 3 of them will be going if not 4