Fly Phoenix Direct
 

Does anyone happen to know anything more about this at all...?!

Non-stop return flights from London to Harare, Zimbabwe.

https://www.flyphoenix.co.uk/

The below ch-aviation article suggests "...the company would charter an A330-200 from an undisclosed technical partner"

https://www.ch-aviation.com/news/139...mbabwe-flights

Rather misleading company name and service description. Perhaps they don't know there is a city in USA called Phoenix and it already has direct flights from London.

"Located in London..."

Address is listed as Accrington. 🤣

I note they have a "representative" at Gatwick, but intend to fly to Stansted. He'll be busy then!

If you put this address: 73 Higher Antley Street, Accrington, United Kingdom, BB5 0SN into Maps, it will tell you everything you need to know...

Address shared with "Spoton Travel - Travel agency". Is that bad?

Interesting that there's not a single minute of aviation experience amongst them. I'll file it under school project.

We are a small start-up airline which will be serving only one route to start with (UK-Zim).
I’ll answer some of your sarcastic comments.
1. yes we are fully registered and compliant with aviation authorities
2. although the offices are based in Greater Manchester, our UK airport is likely to be Stansted or Gatwick but we are still researching as each airport has different costs and taxes etc. Another airport could be Birmingham as it’s more accessible to a lot more people or even Manchester with it being more or less central to make it easy for people to get there. And the parking situations are much better than the London airports.
3) definitely not a school project unless your schools do projects in the millions of pounds (!)

We aim to start flying late October realistically and are partnered with Airbus as our consulting firm.
See you at ZimFest 2025 as we are sponsoring and are also the proud and are officially their travel partner.

Hello trustjephius and welcome to PPRuNe.

Thank you for the information but, if I may, a word of advice. Starting off with:
Is not ideal.
​​​​​​​We wait to hear of developments.

I don't think the comments were necessarily sarcastic but as you undoubtedly know there have been many failed attempts at the setting up the kind of operation that you describe. In recent years were have had FlyPop and Hans Airways that have got as far as acquiring aircraft but not managed to gain an AOC or fly a revenue service. Then there is the notorious Global Airlines, subject of a very long and interesting thread here. They have acquired an aircraft then had it registered to HiFly and sort of operated a couple of revenue services even though in reality they were only charters.

Is it therefore unsurprising that their a more than a small degree of scepticism here, particularly those contributors who have "already been there and got the T-shirt"?

I am interested to learn if your intention is to operate as an airline, with all the licences that such an operation requires, or as a "virtual airline" where your business sells seats via an agent and charters the aircraft from an ACMI operator such as HiFly. To be honest I really do doubt the viability of operating to anywhere else than London, but of course you have to do your research to establish where your market is. I assume it is going to be steeped in VFR traffic, so you need to be flying to where most of your passengers want to go, which as with most markets in UK is London so flying to BHX, much as though it is logistically easy to reach London still isn't London. Even less so Manchester.

I worked in Zim and started an airline there, and I can easily see the potential for a UK Zim connection. Every time I got off the EK flight I was stunned by how many Brits there were in the queue at HRE immigration.

A330 not a bad choice given that 321XLR are like hen’s teeth. Just hope they have better advisors than some other start ups! (Happy to give them some pro bono help. I love Zim and its people!)

I wish them good luck!

Like TwinAisle I wish them the best of luck. I have no idea about these people or who they are but as someone who has seen plenty of start ups I can assure you, look at business plans that start by saying "We are going to be operating a fleet of xxx and offering xxxx served by crew wearing xxx" with lots of glossy pictures... you can bin that!
If they start with "I see a need for capacity here" take it more seriously. I will be watching with interest if it all happens.

Could have come up with a better name however. Sounds like the name of some cheap bucket shop from the 80’s. Or a web address for the Arizona tourist board.

Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

Provide reliable, cost-effective services and nobody will care about the name.

Exactly. We could all provide a list of airlines with names that seemed whacky and far worse than this one but are doing just fine.

And don’t get me started on Heston and Scat!

Or Virgin... :)

I've heard the name Lauda goes down particularly well with the Indian community!

SCAT comes from its origins as Special Cargo Air Transport. I guess technically passengers count as special cargo

I don't think that you get it but SCAT has a far more cruder meaning than the actual airline itself. I suggest that you Google it 😏 😉

But perhaps not from work :)