Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 08:45:17 on Wed, 28
Sep 2016, Neil Williams remarked:

I'm no sure which part of their costs you think were significantly
higher - they had one of the oldest fleets in the air, and the other
two one of the newest. That must impact the cost.

The easyJet and Ryanair argument is that good deals on new planes are
actually cheaper to operate overall - highly reliable, for example.

So BMIbaby's problem was an incompetent fleet purchasing department?

No. The problem was a lack of strategy. The fleet purchasing department can
only do what it is told to do, which was to buy up the cheapest 737s it
could find. That is absolutely not the way to run a low cost airline.

The former British Midland was in its death throes, scrambling around for
anything to stay afloat. Low cost airlines seemed to be the fashion, so it
tried to set up a little one on the cheap, at the same time as it was
trying to create a Virgin Atlantic mini-me in Heathrow (by buying the
failing BMed and a tiny fleets of A330s) and a Flybe mini-me regional
airline (the only bit that has kept the bmi brand). None worked.

I don't know if there was a winning strategy for BM, but the ones it tried
were all obvious losers from the beginning. It ended up being worth less as
a business than the Heathrow slots it owned. Michael Bishop and pals did
well out of it, but Lufthansa was the big loser. BA has also done well with
the surviving bits it bought on the cheap.