Here he is, still waiting for his tow bar to turn up !

Not to state the obvious, but surely people's confidence in flybe will now be lacking?? Future bookings will suffer dramatically, meaning the down turn continues, less bookings, more costs, is there gonna be anyway back from this for them?

Unfortunately, that's more than likely the harsh commercial reality for the company, I can't see any upside with other options. I feel sorry for the staff, crews, etc. The management have to bear accountability for this disaster. Would you hire any of the board members to an exec or non-exec role, nah, I thought as much. Toxic!

No..... nothing like. Sorry I can't give you a number but I have a reputation for lazy answers which I intend to maintain. In 2019 Flybe/ Stobart will definitely be number 3 of the 3 based airlines by a long way - that I can say with confidence.

Well stats are twistable,
Today BE are 62 % of departures but their planes and load factors are of course small so it might not reflect in the airport's passenger stats.
However next year it might be 0.

Sale of certain assets commencing?...

Flybe announce sale & leaseback of the New Walker Hangar at Exeter for £5m.

Possible propping up as the buyer is Exeter Airport.

With the talk about Stobart - worth remembering that the franchise deal ends Feb 2020 anyway.

It would be interesting to know if there was any money owed to Exeter Airport prior to the transaction.

Just having a look at their accounts.

In one sense they're actually so much worse than anyone posting here has really picked up on, as they adjust their accounts for the year before as well. While the accounts show a loss of £12m, they also show what a lay person would best understand to be a loss of closer to £40m.

In another sense they don't look that awful, they are bad but they certainly don't look like Monarch's accounts or the accounts of a company at crisis point. I would say the biggest risk they face isn't directly commercial, but more availability of finance.

If they weren't an airline and therefore subject to intense reputational risk they might be tempted to do a prepack to ditch lease agreements they didn't like. But of course this would harm their reputation and prevent them getting lease agreements they did want.

We can't really know who potential suitors might be without knowing what the strong parts of their network are. If Belfast or London City; IAG? If the SW of England, the European routes, or the Scottish Routes... Sector? If it is a mish-mash of random stuff across the network; either Eastern or nobody? And potential matches for the SAS flying... I guess that's CityJet or Nordica?

The Stobart Group could buy FlyBe without merging them with Stobart Air
Flybe are kind of a different type of operation to Stobart Air and Warwick Brady is/was a low cost airline man.
He could oversee it like Walsh oversees BA. I'm sure he has run into enough contacts to put his own management team in.
Advantage is that even if other airlines with larger planes take on some of FlyBe's routes when they grow, it will still be a plus for his airport.

I don't see any natural fit for Flybe in IAG. IAG already gets the feed from the UK regions to LHR and Dublin for those travelling onto the US. The other UK regions not already serviced by Stobart could be in the future if Flybe exit stage left. The point to point stuff from the regions to near Europe is relatively low/soft yield as has been demonstrated by the losses made so far by Flybe so wouldn't interest IAG. Any slots that IAG might be interested in could be picked up through an administrator if the airline goes boom. My money is on Stobart getting it for a song or administration.

I posted this link a week or two ago - an estimate by an aviation consultancy firm (with which I have no connection) of flyBE profitability by airport. Of course these are averages and will vary by route. I note from the comments below the chart, that the consultants estimate that for example out of 32 BHX routes there are 10 profitable, 4 marginal and 18 loss-making. I believe their numbers are based on screen-scraping fares, estimating averages, and looking at flyBE's published accounts to estimate the cost base, so they are not gospel, but they seem a reasonable first estimate.

Overall the network seems enough of a mixed bag that I'd agree with some other posters: I don't see the attraction for another airline in buying the company, warts and all, when it could just cherry-pick the routes or bases it wanted.

Incidentally here is flyBE's results presentation from 2 days ago which gives an overview of the financials.

People don't want to pay a bloody fortune to fly these days not only because of APD but because of the state of the average persons pockets and the fact that you can now fly to the US with Norwegian for the price of a return flight to Scotland with Flybe. There has to be a sort of cleansing and adjustment to reality. If Flybe cannot make their monopoly work - who the H*LL can?

easyJet could apply for the LHR domestic slots to operate ABZ and EDI if that happens and I think they would be a far better operator than Flybe with their ridiculous Q400's on such a route!

What's so ridiculous? - these are exactly the type of sector lengths the Q400 was optimised for. Probably only 10-15 mins longer sector time than a jet and much more economical. Some routes that BEE use the Dash on do push the envelope a bit, but not this one (or any other UK domestic sector).

Yes, those sector lengths are in the Q400 sweet spot - I agree with you there. However in fairness, in the specific case of LHR-EDI/ABZ, one could argue that a 78-seater is not the optimal use of scarce Heathrow slots (although I wouldn't go as far as "ridiculous")...

Slot wise i agree the routes may not be the most optimal use of them... As it stands, the aircraft is indeed the perfect fit for these routes however and from an outsiders view, they seem to be performing pretty well...

You have to blame the EU "commission" for why the slots can't be used for somewhere else, but that's a whole different story.

Given the expense of operating into LHR, operating your smallest type of aircraft into the airport is going to put you at a serious disadvantage in terms of cost per seat when compared with competitors. External analysis on linkedin shoes that the BE flights LHR-ABZ/EDI are poor and generating negative 5% margin consistently based on air-fare analysis.

That's probably more to do with how many pax are actually paying for their seats on these flights. I've seen many comments that they are quite heavily used by positioning crew.