Express & Star comment: What next for the aviation industry?

Coming just five months after holiday giant Thomas Cook went to the wall, it serves as another reminder of the increasingly treacherous nature of the sector, which has also lost budget airline FlyBMI in the past year.

Thomas Cook’s woes had surfaced long before it went into liquidation. The 178-year-old firm had gone through a calamitous merger in 2007, while debts ballooned year-on-year.

With losses up to £1.5 billion, it was only a matter of time before it hit the skids, which is precisely what happened after one final, doomed bail out attempt.

In some ways, Flybe’s downfall has been equally as easy to predict.

The firm, which flew to 27 destinations from Birmingham Airport, spent most of the past decade attempting to become one of the big boys, with plans laid out for it to transform into Europe’s biggest regional airline.

The idea was simple enough.

Raising cash through a stock exchange floatation would enable Flybe to increase its fleet size and concentrate on moving passengers between the continent’s minor cities.

But the model struggled from the word go, at one point leaving the operator with a fleet of aircraft which it could not fly.

Eventually the money ran out, but not before a stay of execution at the start of last year when a consortium piled more good money after bad.

It may have been a massive drop in bookings due to coronavirus which finally killed the airline off, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time.

Once again, it is passengers and staff who suffer. The loss of Thomas Cook forced a repatriation of more than 150,000 British holidaymakers, while thousands of Flybe customers have seen their flights cancelled. Around 2,000 jobs are at risk.

There is no easy solution to the challenges facing the aviation industry, but it is clear that Flybe’s planes will not be the last ones to disappear from our skies.