Flybe, the UK regional airline, has gone bust for a second time – with the loss of hundreds of jobs and leaving the travel plans of tens of thousands of passengers in tatters.
The news was broken at 4am on Saturday by the Civil Aviation Authority, which is urging travellers with bookings on Flybe not to go to the airport.
Remind me of the original Flybe?
The original Flybe, which had previously been known as Jersey European and British European, had been fairly successful for several decades – when it floated on the stock exchange in 2010 it was briefly worth a quarter-of-a-billion pounds. But a combination of mismanagement and misfortune culminated in a £100m rescue bid.
After Flybe mark 1 burned through that cash in a year, it went bust in early March 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic. More than 2,000 people lost their jobs and tens of thousands of passengers with advance bookings had their travel plans torn up.
How was the airline resurrected?
One of the partners in that failed rescue bid, Cyrus Capital, believed there was still a viable business. It bought the name from the receiver and crucially also secured valuable slots at London Heathrow. The reborn Flybe was re-established at Birmingham airport, with a big operation at Belfast City, and links from Heathrow airport to a range of UK destinations as well as Amsterdam.
The flight data specialist Cirium says Flybe was scheduled to serve 17 destinations across the UK and Europe in 2023 – with Belfast City, Birmingham and London Heathrow being the largest destinations by flights.
The airline operated seven daily flights at Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport, to Amsterdam, Belfast, Newcastle and Newquay.
Next week Flybe was scheduled to operate 292 flights – equating to over 22,700 seats.
What went wrong?
Relatively few of those seats were sold at prices high enough to make Flybe viable. Operations restarted in April 2022. But by then rivals had moved in on the previously profitable routes, with Loganair taking the crown as the UK’s biggest regional airline, leaving little room for Flybe.
The nine months of Flybe mark 2’s existence were characterised by frequent flight cancellations and rearrangements of the route network, with late aircraft deliveries adding to the problem.
On the flights that did operate, passenger loads were often very low: I flew from Leeds…
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