RVF750

If I read this right, they have incurred a lot of costs in revalidating a lot of crews. However how would this square with Albert Hall’s suggestion that the resurrection is merely a smokescreen to make some money for selling Heathrow slots? Training up half a dozen crews at most for a single Dash maybe, for appearances sake, but hundreds?

Its certainly a plan, but surely the value of slots at Heathrow has dropped over the last few months?

No matter what the rationale behind this is, they will have a massive PR job to get Joe Public back on board and probably airports and service providers as well. Flybe left a bitter taste in a lot of people's mouth so it will be interesting to see what operational model they follow and as stated previously, will they have learnt anything from there past.

Why do they need a massive PR exercise to get Joe Public on board? Does Ryanair have this backing? IMO it’s all about offering flights to destinations enough people want to go to at a reasonable price.

As for those who have lost out from Flybe’s demise, they know full well they are dealing with a totally different business and will be happy to deal with them subject to the usual checks and risk assessment.

DC3 Dave, as I see it, the last year or two of Flybe saw a huge decline in the airline's standing with its regular flyers. Reliability was never brilliant but was then compounded by the pilot leave fiasco leading to mass flight cancellations. On the flights that did operate, Flybe set about trying to utterly p**s off passengers by zealous enforcement of a hand baggage policy that left many avoiding the airline on that basis alone. When they did fly, the Q400s were increasingly poor inside and that did not fill you with confidence about everything else.

Yes, Ryanair have similar baggage policies but at least they have been very consistent - you know what you're signing up to. With Flybe you just did not know if you'd be cancelled, delayed, or randomly raped and pillaged at the gate if your hand baggage was deemed fractionally too big according to baggage sizers and ground staff which seemed to vary by airport. Even if you made it through that obstacle course then you boarded a Q400, invariably got seat-moved as the aircraft was "trim sensitive" - whatever that means to the average punter - and subjected to a filthy, dog-eared and tatty cabin.

Through no fault of those on the front line, it turned into a shambles of an airline which you couldn't depend on to turn up on time or avoid a sense of trepidation every time you set out to fly with them. It needed a change of brand to shed itself of this image. It says it all that a certain CEO offhandedly waved away the cabin crew when she was politely asked on a Q400 one day to remove her iPhone headphones for the safety demonstration.

And someone somewhere thinks it's a good idea to put all this back in the sky under the same damaged brand as before. It would probably be an easier sell to put a branch of Ratners back on every high street.

I'm sure others have equally strong and possibly opposing views. But for me the "essential regional connectivity" that Flybe offered is now provided by others where it's truly needed, and the rest of this sorry mess is best left to an airline history book still to be written.

A little bit here about the rumoured legal bid over the LHR slots

https://londonairtravel.com/2020/09/...gal-challenge/

I’m a bit confused by some of these theories because surely the LHR slots Flybe used were remedy slots and these can’t be sold.

I thought so too but apparently these Cyrus people have a legal case that the slots can be possessed and sold. I'm sure that they would say that though! Probably worth chucking a few hundred grand at legal fees to give it a try, if you put yourself in their position. It was described to me as pretty desperate but when the possible jackpot outweighs the losses to such an extent then you'd stay at the gambling table for a bit longer to see if your luck improves, I suppose.

G-CLMT looks like Dash No2..... expect more.

Flybe 2 hasn’t paid for anybody revaluation, the individuals did or with help from the job centre. Flybe 1 may have paid for the retained staff. More staff are being added to get this up and running.

​​​​Sorry what? You say the Job Centre is doing what now?

Job centres have a pot of cash they can use to help people back into work by doing courses etc. They have funded some people’s Dash revaluations.

Who says that is the case?

Take a look at an existing UK operator Eastern Airways. Its not obvious from their branding that the AOC is actually in the name of my old air-taxi job Air Kilroe Ltd. Thus even if former FlyBe assests are used in some way there will be a new name to splash with publicity.

In fact how about a guessing game to take up a few minutes of lockdown? Any ideas..........

2B or not 2B

Jamie2009

I'm not sure that there's any evidence to suggest this. OE-LGC was re-registered to G-CLMT in May of last year when ownership moved from Austrian to EIC Aircraft Leasing.
Looks like the aircraft has been in storage since.

Clarification:
G-CLMT is ex OE-LGC. Different frame from G-CLXC which is ex OE-LGA.

G-CLMT Inside Exter Hanger

photo courtesy of shamu28, Flickr

What fleet size do we think for any reincarnation?

i guess 5 - 8 aircraft to begin with .......

How much money are we talking? And by revaluations I guess you mean sim hours to remain current?

OKAY this where I can see something possible, a new airline on some of the old flybe network relaunched from the ashes. But to be super clear :
1) Don't call it flybe - the branding is tainted with actual bankruptcy (bad) and unreliability (much worse) . Yes it is, let's not deny it. Call it something else.
2) One of the problems with the now bankrupt flybe was operating old Q400s in a market that was better suited capacity wise to an ATR or a jet for speed. Flying even older Q400s doesn't address this. They're looking to make the same mistake again. Actually in that case they should call it flybe

allan1987

That's not G-CLXC.... it's OE-LGC (G-CLMT) being broken for spares (photo courtesy of shamu28, Flickr...)