There’s been am Elephant in the Room in the sale of British Midland Airways to Interational Consolidated Airlines Group, and it’s been BMI Baby.
The Low Cost Carrier (operating a fleet of 737-300/500 aircraft, based out of various UK airports) has been a questionmark in the sale of the sale – with IAG getting a discount from Lufthansa if they failed to sell the unit off.
According to Bloomberg, Intro Aviation GmbH is the company who are looking at the books of BMI Baby to see if they can turn the airline around or approrpiatly restructured. And they’ve had experiance of turning around airlines – in the past they turned around Deutsche BA (before selling it to Air Berlin) and LTU (who they also sold to… Air Berlin).
Whilst Intro Aviation has come out with it, BMI states there are several intrested parties and BMI are idenfiying a preferred buyer.
Meanwhile the sale of the BMI Regional arm is all but complete, subject to preconditions left.
This will leave IAG the bits of BMI they want – the slots and the remains of the mainline airline.
BMI Baby has a tough time of it, being formed from the cast-offs of the BMI Fleet when BMI switched from Boeing to Airbus, and adding older jets as needed. The route map is very leisure orientated (with a few core business routes). Alas, BMI Baby by itself does make tough work of it life by a shifting route network and heavy competition from Ryanair, EasyJet and even Jet2.
However, I’ll say this: If the sale goes through – and people keep their jobs, then it’s a foundation to hopefully rebuilt the airline into something better.