[QUOTE=RW20;11581311]Post 2454 will give you an idea of my optimism for the future :ok:

Not entirely sure of a direct head to head. But a rough indicator taken from Air Baltic and Easyjet's investor reports.

Air Baltic CASK for their A220 fleet = €4.75
Easy's CASK for their combined Airbus fleet = £4.44

What's the cost of a new A220 compared to a paid for EMB145, and who wants to put up the money?

Well - there's always SOMENONE willing to invest - see Global Airlines thread - and you can get a lot more passengers in a 220 - so your economies of scale start to work. Flying commercial jets in Europe with only 40-50 seats doesn't work very well.

Outside of LCC's and feeding hubs, what regional flying works well?

Converting €4.75 at today's £ rate that comes in about £2.95 £4.06. Time for AGS to consider a dialogue with Air Baltic?

I stand corrected by post 2806, maths was never my strong point! To my mind the A220 is competitive with their big brothers.

£1 = €1.17
£4.06 = €4.75

Until or unless the obstacles on departure from runway 20 are remediated, pretty much any airline operating at Southampton whether with ATR72, A319 or Embraer 145 will continue to see limitations. You run into these with a low QNH or high OAT, so in poor weather or on a warm sunny day, it reduces the available payload. The limitations have improved quite a bit with the recent opening of the starter strip as the declared distances have improved, but they have not gone away. What you can do/fly from that runway has changed, but it is not limitless by any means - A319/320 being better than 737-800 unless the -800 has the uprated engines (which are expensive).

That's before you get to any consideration of the operating hour restrictions in relation to a potential base by whomever.

Hypothetically, if Loganair were to consider their future and choose growth and effective competition on domestic routes against EZY, what would be the difference in CASK for:
ERJ145 vs E190E2/195E2/A221/A223?

Does it stack up? If Loganair can operate business friendly flight times at low cost prices, surely they can tap into the demand. Plenty of domestic routes out of SOU, GLA, EDI, LHR, ABZ could support a fleet of around a dozen E-jets. Take SOU-NCL for example - Flybe operated 78 seat aircraft up to 4 times daily and pulled in over 12,000 monthly passengers.

Loganair now operate 2 daily 49 seat aircraft and less than 5,000 monthly passengers.

Presumably the route is profitable, but that to me suggests that the route is under served, bringing the risk of competition jumping in on the route, which… in the shape of EZY, poses a threat to LM, and ends up worse for the consumer in the end.

How does LM step up?

Flybe went bust doing what you are suggesting, LM have survived doing what they are doing.

By not getting e-Jets for a start. With the noise-related charges at LHR for e-jets, anyone considering flying 170s/190s etc into Heathrow needs their head examined.

I’m not sure you meant it but your post reads as if you believe that any route that is profitable must be being underserved.

well a drop from 12K to 5k would suggest that there is an untapped market - but then you have to consider the price elasticity of course. Loganair are in the business of making a profit - if they could make thate same profit from 1k passengers I'm sure they'd do it. They'll (wisely) bail out if someone comes in and undercuts them

But how do you define “underserved”? Just because the route generated more passengers when sub economic fares were offered doesn’t mean it’s now underserved.

Everyone seems very quick to forget this thing we had called a pandemic which changed working practices, changed the way in which much business takes place (on a quick-fire series of Teams or Zoom meetings instead of days out of the office on business travel) and the minor issue that we have a cost of living crisis going on which is impacting discretionary spend on all sorts of things from cinemas to air travel.

You cannot say that because Flybe carried X in 2019 on any given route, it should now be carrying Y today - it doesn't matter whether it's Loganair, easyJet or Timbuktu Airways as the operator. The world has changed. All of those factors have affected the demand for air travel in different ways on different routes, depending on what the customer base was for that route before the pandemic and now.

Even in Flybe's day their frequencies were up and down like a yo-yo. NCL-SOU was generally 3pd. EDI-SOU went between 4 and 6 and might even have hit 7 for a short time. MAN-SOU was generally 5 but at different times was 4 or 6. Does a 3pd Q400 back in 2019 translate into a 2pd E145 today to service the demand which is still there on the route? Quite possibly.

It's incredible how quick people are to forget about all of these factors when deciding what airlines should and shouldn't be doing! And if I was Air Baltic (which I'm not) then I'd have thought the possibility of setting up a UK AOC to fly some short domestic sectors with A220s would probably be somewhere at the bottom of my list of priorities, if not off the bottom of it completely.

Agree with Albert Hall and in which case the idea of someone like easyJet offering a cheaper fare and once daily due to reduced demand, as a result of the pandemic/cost of living, is probably the most obvious way to go for many regional trunk routes

Loganair and Eastern are the only long term survivors in the UK regional airline sector, the latter arguably only because it is bank rolled. Everyone else has either gone bust or pulled - out the best example of the latter is BA, who gave up on it years ago. For some, (EasyJet) the UK domestic market is a very small part of the overall operation.

Loganair have survived by being very conservative- they will never over supply, they will just make a decent yield and offer a frequency on which they can sustain that probably around 2 -3 flights per day. They can always retreat to Bonnie Scotland and the subsidies available there.

Without any prospect of PSO routes Southampton will have to survive - by attracting airlines -as Teesside has arguably done or relying on operators believing they can make money. _ it's no good begging to airlines to come and do more.

I wouldn't say Southampton can never have PSO routes. By virtue of the healthcare sector travel from the Channel Islands, both JER and GCI routes are borderline PSOs anyway and DFT has recently changed the rules so that not all PSOs which they support have to run to/from London. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that other regional routes could see PSOs in due time. The problem for SOU will be proximity to LHR on that argument - if there is a problem of any nature, which there may not be.

Why does JER need a formal PSO ? There are clearly airlines willing to provide flights on a commercial basis year round without specific route subsidy to many airports in mainland UK. JER in particular is big enough not to need the protectionism seen at GCI - and the competition between carriers prevents large scale monopoly pricing abuse.
Perhaps ACI *might* be able to justify a need for PSO though...

Reading back on a weeks worth of posts I have come to the conclusion that this thread is populated by an excess of fantasists and dreamers.