Interesting to read that the administrators were first contacted back in August 22 then brought in to start working on a controlled administration in early January even though at the same time the company was recruiting and starting courses for pilots and cabin crew. They knew people were going to great expense to move to Belfast / Birmingham and in some cases give up other jobs, and yet they were busy planning to potentially pull the plug.

Funny how in January, the board, the highly paid consultants and the administrators didn't realise that they were supposed to be consulting about possible redundancies and not recruiting more staff.:=

Come on Interpath, this stinks. How about compensation rather than pay-outs to secured creditors?

Interestingly it basically proves the sceptics here correct. Much of what was said is exactly what is in this report.

Now seems not as no recognition or internal association arrangements were completed, very disappointing for all .

Anyone that was in Flybe 1 would have told you that when this bunch of shysters set up Mk 2. It was never anything but an exercise in clawing back money they lost when they thought they could make a quick buck out of Mk 1. I’m pretty sure that if Covid hadn’t come along and put the final nail in the coffin, that the 2 leading members that took over for £0.01p/share in 2019, would have quietly transferred the LHR slots, then sold off the rest to the first sucker that came along. Bitter? You bet I am.

But the LHR slots were never theirs to transfer were they? It was a huge bet that they ever would be.

Doubling down on your losses, wow. That report makes for a chastening read. And this liquidation stuff doesn't come cheap does it.

No they weren’t, but who knows what might have gone on if they’d actually become part of the “red tail” mob, Virgin Connect, as was planned and then perhaps slot transfers within the group might have been tried. But that’s all semantics now.

With the track record of 2 of the 3 players it never seemed that “Flybe”, the airline, were high on their list of priorities; survival of Virgin (mainline) was and forever will be. But what the whole package contained and what good parts they could use for their advantage was more their aim I believe. Because as sure as “God made little green apples”, big changes would have had to be made to make it profitable or they’d have wound it all up in a heart beat. And if you don’t believe me, have a read of Tom Bower’s books on Sir R B.

Agree Buster. Covid confused everything and its worth considering what might have happened without that and if Virgin Express had developed. Its easy to say people were suckers to get involved in Mk 2 but for many pilots they at least managed to get Type ratings and IR's out of it and are employable again. It's the office staff and Cabin Crew I feel sorry for. Many gave up other jobs and moved location all on the back of a deception. There should be an investigation into who knew what and Interpath's role in all this should also be looked at. They may have been doing their best to sort out some sort of pre-pack but the way staff were lured in right at the end was sheer deception.

That's what happens in any business in any industry that's near the edge. If you stop taking bookings, or stop hiring then word is out , everyone takes to the hills and your credit evaporates. And those you owe money to grab whatever assets they can - immediately.

You plug on hoping that somehow it will all come good.

And sometimes that happens - we always hear about the ones that go over the edge but there are quite a few that survive near-death experiences and continue for years

I've been in both :(

Although BALPA and Unite were not recognised by Flybe 2, there's absolutely no reason for them (and any other union) to use that as an excuse to walk away from their responsibilities to any employee who was a member of the union.

I'm no insolvency expert but I think there may be a path here that interested parties could take. The fixed and floating charge over Flybe 2's assets was taken on 15 August 2022, which the administrator's report says was around the time that the shareholder was looking for other options to fund the business.

If you take a fixed charge over assets and the company then goes bust a short time afterwards, the validity and effectiveness of that charge can be called into question after the event. So where DLP/Cyrus is expected to get a significant pay-out from the administrators, that is only on the basis of the fixed and floating charge placing it as a secured creditor. Changing that might make a very big difference to the amounts owing to the poor sods left out of a job by this charade. One for the unions to pick up on behalf of their members.

Very good point Albert.

Cyrus may argue that they pumped a lot of money in an want some of it back, but it was presumably they who were insisting on the charade of flying empty aircraft around just to preserve slots. The actual frontline managers might have been able to achieve more and get it up and running as a proper regional airline flying more appropriate routes has they not had aircraft crew and resources tied up on the "other" project.
Interpath would have know that this was going on and must have known that staff were being deceived. Even days before collapse there were announcements going out about freshly secured staff travel deals. Not the sort of thing that a company going down the tubes would be worried about. Everyone knew it was risky but there was a very good deception going on to suggest normality. All done under the noses of Interpath.

Asturias. I agree, and take you r point about trying to keep it normal and hoping it will come good. Without Covid, Mk one under Virgin connect might just have survived a near death experience. There were a few of those on the way.

The sad thing is that I hear one or two of their normal routes were actually starting to do well.

What I find strange is how the management seemingly did nothing to change course. Interpath were contacted last August, the same time the airline ditched Leeds and launched Newquay and announced Newcastle, with other routes due to start in March 2023.

Was that the big plan to turn around £5m per month losses, flights to Cornwall? I don't get it.

I'm not surprised some routes did well, probably Bhx - Belfast and Scotland did well in terms of bums on seats. Whether they were able to manage the yield to turn a profit on those specific routes is another thing.

HR saw what was coming and paid all employee's a few days earlier than the normal January pay date:D.
Most were employed for less than two years so limited protection.

If they had gone ATR from the start and not the unreliable Q400 it would still be in business and in partnership with KLM/AF/Delta/Sky Team providing alternative UK regional connectivity from LHR (in competition with IAG) plus the regional P2P routes.
Not getting the aircraft delivered as promised, and naively believing they would be delivered combined with the aircraft in service being so unreliable was the killer. Contrary to popular belief, on the routes where selling seats was the priority they were competing and selling enough seats.
Flying routes to service slot keeping requirements and prioritising those routes (LBA-LHR) added significantly to the £5 mil losses per month.
At least now it's dead and buried for good so everyone can move on, although it is a real shame. 50% of pilots were working their notice period when it folded.

A lot of posters on here can pat themselves on the back for sucessfully predicting the futile nature of the restart. However, I can't recall anyone (including me) predicting the real reasons it would ultimately fail.

I'm not so sure the ATR would have been the golden goose. The choice of routes just didnt deliver anywhere near the revenue needed to turn a profit. Their LF barely ever got about 50% and considering the significant competition they were facing on most of the routes they selected they were never going to turn that into a profit, irrespective of it being on an ATR or Dash 8.

There have been frequent statements that the late delivery of the Q400s meant they couldn't build up fast enough and lacked scale, including in the administrator's report. It's rather hard to see how building up faster would have done anything other than burned even more money more quickly than they did.

Well it was always going to be a struggle but what killed them off quick was the appalling inability to run flights on time - or even at all. There aren't a lot of flyers on soem of those destinations and word gets out very very quickly if there are problems.

And boy - were there problems.:(

Presumably, as has already been stated, because there were only 6 aircraft flying of which 5 were tasked with the preservation of the LHR/AMS slots and burning through the cash quickly as these routes could never be profitable on that size of aircraft. They needed the extra aircraft to come quickly in order to fly regional flying that actually could make money to absorb the losses incurred on the LHR slot play. All of which proved to be a fools errand in the end!

Not sure whats left of the regional UK market is big to make enough cash to register a profit and absorb the sort of losses the existing route network was making.

The airline was losing around £48m - £60m a year - Loganair made £5m profit total last year!

I get the point, but that is predicated on the assumption that any of the regional flying would work. Up against Emerald, BA and Aer Lingus (at the time) in BHD, KLM in Amsterdam, easyJet now running amok in BHD also, Loganair, Eastern and others - wasn't it simply a case that no matter what they did, anything worth doing was already being done by someone else and with very few exceptions, the only things left from Flybe 1.0 weren't worth doing?

That's the case now. It wasn't when they started and if the aircraft had arrived when they were supposed to, there were opportunities. All gone now, as per your comments, with the possible exceptions of BHX-GLA/EDI which are poorly served by Easy.

Wasn't this basically BE 1.0's big problem? If they happened to stumble across a route that was a goldmine, Ryanair or easyJet would move in and clean up?