FlyBMI - gone into administration

[whole diary]

[4064ReadingAbbey]

This thread is being drifted by a strong tangental crosswind!

To get back a little on course/topic, I was intrigued by -

Figures for aircraft and airline fuel consumption are publicly available. Ryanair is a low-cost airline serving mainly European destinations; it seats 189 people in its Boeing 737-800s. Using typical values for sector lengths, fuel consumption and seat occupancy it can be seen that the fuel consumption is marginally greater than 3 litres/100 km/seat - based on typical sector consumption of something over 5 tonnes and a typical sector being something over an hour. This figure will obviously vary depending on sector lengths, cruising altitude, load, winds and air temperature but will remain close to 3 litres/100 km/seat - it will be neither 1.5 litres/100 km/seat nor 6 litres/100 km/seat

Surely aircraft fuel consumption is exponentially greater on take-off? Do the figures above represent cruising consumption or do they take into account take-off as well?

And to get back totally on topic - did I hear correctly that FlyBMI had an average passenger load of 18 per flight? In which case presumably each passenger's carbon footprint would have been enormous!

These figures include take-off consumption. A 737-800 burns roughly 2,400kg per hour in the cruise, so short-haul routes have a higher consumption per sector than long-haul routes for the same aircraft type.

However as TonyK wrote in post 37, consumption is very carefully controlled by the flight ops department and the flight crew. Maximum, or the required, take-off power is used only for two or three minutes or so after which the engines are throttled back for the climb. Generally it takes about 20-25 minutes to reach cruise altitude of 30 to 35,000ft after which the power level is reduced again. To avoid the passengers having ear problems on decent the rate is usually less than about 2,000ft per minute - corresponding to a cabin altitude change rate of around 400 ft/min (for a cruise cabin altitude of 8,000ft). This means that the engines are returned to flight idle for the 20 minutes or so of the descent until the landing pattern is joined. Of course air traffic control may dictate a less than optimum approach so consumption will be higher than the best case would suggest.

[IndustryInsider]

I see another European budget airline, Wow Air, with flights into London and Edinburgh has stopped flying 'leaving thousands stranded'.

https://www.itv.com/news/2019-03-28/thousands-stranded-as-wow-air-stops-flying/

[Thatcham Crossing]

WOW have been on life-support for a while. They expanded very (too) quickly in recent years, with an operation based upon using Keflavik as a low-cost hub for flights into Europe to the east, and USA and Canada to the west.

They were then subject to a take-over bid by the more established Icelandic "full-service" airline Icelandair (who operate in a similar way), but they announced they were pulling-out at the weekend (as I think WOW lost some other investors).

As this was happening, aircraft were starting to be grounded (one in Montreal, that I am aware of, maybe others) as the lessors started to take control.

There is something of a right-sizing going on in the commercial airline industry at the moment, off the back of too much expansion and resulting over-capacity in some markets (low-cost transatlantic being one).

[TonyK]

I flew with Wow last October, from Montreal to Keflavik. It was a nice tidy A320 NEO, and was an unremarkable flight. We took off and landed to schedule, with no drama en route. I don't recall empty seats on board. I have also flown with Icelandair, which is a more polished operation than the budget airline. I flew to Vancouver and home from Seattle, both changing at Keflavik, motivated by the low fare. It proved very enjoyable, not least because we stopped in Iceland for 4 days without any extra fare. Newly refurbed Boeing 767 between Heathrow and Keflavik, 757s on the other legs.
It is a shame to see Wow go, but I found it hard to understand how a country of 350,000 people could sustain two international airlines. They do punch above their weight in many ways, though, as the England football team found at the Euro competition.

[TonyK]

Discussion regarding FlyBe going into administration now split from this topic.

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=22994.0

[GBM]

https://www.flybe.com/en
On 28 January 2023, the High Court appointed David Pike and Mike Pink as Joint Administrators of Flybe Limited (“Flybe”).

Flybe has now ceased trading and all flights from and to the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) operated by Flybe have been cancelled and will not be rescheduled.

If you are a passenger affected by this event, please read the advice below.