In message
-sept
ember.org, at 08:30:06 on Wed, 28 Sep 2016, Recliner
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.

Getting back to competitors for Uber, none would be trying to win on
several fronts simultaneously, so perhaps we can agree that BMIbaby is a
red herring.
--
Roland Perry