Often when airlines are put up for sale, they don’t come out of it well. The British Airways low-cost creation, Go, was swallowed whole by easyJet and subsumed into the orange operation in 2003. Two of its key bases, at London Stansted and Newcastle, were closed during the Covid crisis.
Flybe fared even worse after it was put on the market in 2018; within 16 months the regional airline had gone bust. It has now been resurrected, but finds itself supplanted by Loganair as the UK’s biggest regional carrier.
