What would the UK have looked like without Flybe?

Plane Talk: No airline can endure for long the slump in bookings that comes with uncertainty

My, how we laughed. At 5.56pm on Tuesday I finished this article, which at the time I had headlined: “What would the UK look like without Flybe?”

I prophesied: “We shall see very soon what becomes of the Virgin Atlantic-led consortium that now owns Flybe; no airline can endure for long the slump in bookings that comes with uncertainty.”

“Very soon” turned out to be one minute; at 5.57pm, the news emerged that the troubled airline had been saved. So, as you have seen, it is now headed: “What would the UK have looked like without Flybe?”

The great Flybe scare of January 2020 may come to be seen as a brilliant public relations coup that led to a rethink on Air Passenger Duty (APD) for domestic flights.

Stage 1: let it be known that company X is in financial trouble (even if it happens to be co-owned by three well-heeled investors).

Stage 2: for 24 hours, invite the nation (and bandwagon-chasing politicians) to ponder the loss of a (mostly) much-loved business and what it would mean for their region.

Stage 3: reveal that if only a troublesome tax could be cut, then all would be fine.

But it is still instructive to consider “What if?” the threat of closure had been carried out.

It is fair to assume that some solution would swiftly be found for the 10 per cent of Flybe’s services that begin or end at George Best Belfast City; the people of Northern Ireland can make a strong argument about the importance of connectivity between their country and England, Wales and Scotland.

Key routes from Belfast could become Public Service Obligation flights, with other airlines encouraged to fly them with taxpayer backing.

Yet three English cities have significantly more flights than Belfast: Manchester, Southampton and Birmingham, each with well over 200 Flybe departures a week. These airports would have looked significantly emptier had Flybe vanished.

But some routes would, in time, attract replacement airlines. It all depends on their perceived value.

Compare two routes from Manchester, to Edinburgh and Exeter. Each route is about 185 miles, with a “block time” from gate to gate of slightly over an hour. Does Manchester to Edinburgh need four flights a day? Probably not. Indeed, there is a good, fast train service direct from Manchester airport to the Scottish capital in three-and-a-half hours.

Three daily links to the Devon airport have more merit, as the rail alternative is significantly slower.

Staying in Exeter, I could not envisage rival airlines rushing to fill the route to London City. The rail service from the Devon city to the capital has just been improved, making a 9am arrival in central London feasible.

The six-flights-a-day service from Birmingham to Glasgow also looks vulnerable: again, there are reasonable rail alternatives. And with easyJet poised to launch on the 257-mile route, I see this link going the same way as Bristol-Newcastle (just one mile shorter). What appears to be natural Flybe territory ends up being grabbed by a bigger budget airline, whose larger planes cuts costs significantly.

There are many links where the Flybe slogan “Faster than Rail or Road” still carries plenty of weight. The odd thing is, some of them have very few flights.

According to OAG data, the most infrequent Flybe link connects Wick, in the far northeast of the Scottish mainland, with Aberdeen. The 90-mile hop across the Moray Firth takes just 40 minutes, compared with an astonishing seven hours by train (change at Inverness, if you’re interested). Yet there is just one daily flight each week, from Monday to Friday.

I now look forward to Flybe flourishing under its new identity, Virgin Connect. But were it one day to fail (and, if it does, APD will be only part of the problem), viable routes will return and the rest will wither.

Travellers in the UK enjoy a thriving aviation market because it works efficiently, taking people where they really want to go.