Interesting article on the Flight Global website. Dart reckon they have enough cash to stay afloat until next August even if the fleet remains grounded. Whatever way you look at it, Dart must have some pretty robust finance plans.

A (even for pprune) particularly ill-informed comment. Plenty of online documented evidence to refute.

"guy_incognito" What makes you say unionisation was a factor in the insolvency of TC?.

Base closures, crew replaced by Eastern European ACMI contractors, etc this is the effect of unions..

Strange you should say that. TUI had planned in a few ACMI Smartlynx aircraft for this summer.

Were they using ACMIs for expansion or cost reduction?

It's cheaper to wet-lease a couple of aircraft seasonally than to keep them year-round with all the associated personnel, given that just a fraction of the capacity is needed outside the peak summer season.

Satoshi Nakamoto

With regard to TCX's use of ACMI (and it is reasonable to assume TUI's motivation would be the same) the objective was to enable expansion in the most cost effective way and at the same time drive down the fixed cost of running an airline all year. This often caused tension between the management and the pilot workforce (not cabin crew, as company crew were used to ensure on board product standardization) due to the feeling, sometimes backed up by stated intention, that the direction of travel was towards more ACMI and less TCX fleet. In the end, Union negotiation enabled a compromise to be reached so that both parties could be reasonably satisfied that UK jobs were secure and that the company could be cost effective. There were casualty's along the way. A couple of small bases were dis-established for year round pilots jobs, but in the years up to TCX's failure in-house pilot recruitment was maintained and increased in spite of an increase in ACMI use during the summer. I have absolutely no doubt that ACMI usage in TCX would have been far greater if the Union had not been there to push back against it. None of this had much bearing on the eventual Group business failing. as that was due to the greed and rank amateurishness of the Board of Directors, as pointed out when they were publicly humiliated by Rachael Reeve MP, during the House of Commons Business Select Committee investigation into the failure. TUI seem to be run by a lot of far smarter people than TCG was, the question is, are they smart enough to out-run Covid19.?

TUI’s planned use of ACMI was to cover the Max grounding. Nothing more, nothing less.

The only regular 3rd party flying TUI have is Sunwing and Norwegian, amounting to about eight lines of flying per Summer - certainly not 25%.

Sunwing is reciprocal with TUI aircraft and crew heading West during the Winter.

During normal times, of course.

easyJet, BA and Virgin all did flying for TUI every year prior to this summer. TUI had around 20 aircraft planned for 3rd party this summer and only 6 MAXs (excluding delayed deliveries) that are grounded. So the remaining 14 aircraft works out at roughly 25%.

Thats my understanding anyway. I guess my main point was: TUI guys must be pleased that 3rd party can be scrapped rather than their own jobs.

For the tour operator, yes. Why stop there, you can book TUI holidays to the Indian Ocean with flights on almost every Middle Eastern airline too. This thread is about the airline.

They were due to have significantly more than 6 Max’s in service by this summer, and were crewed accordingly, so no jobs have been saved due to ACMI being scrapped.

The only planned ACMI aside from Norwegian or Sunwing is due to the Max grounding.

Are applications open at RYR yet? Obviously no hiring for a while, just wondering if they plan to create a hold file for when things pick up again, and if there’s many stood down pilots waiting for a return date.

As expected, Thankyou sir/maam.