SCOTTISH airline Loganair touched down not once but twice in Jersey on Sunday as the family-owned business flew in an Embraer 145 jet and ATR turboprop aircraft within an hour or so of each other.
This was to launch its services from the Island – first announced in July for January but expedited in light of Blue Island’s announcement on Friday evening that it was stopping flying.
In welcoming Loganair’s Chief Executive Officer Luke Farajallah to the Island this weekend, Ports of Jersey boss Matt Thomas said he had never seen an airline mobilise so quickly.
He said: “There was a phone call at around 10 pm on Friday night and 36 hours later, we had two Loganair aeroplanes on the ground. Perhaps the silver lining to this unfortunate set of events is that this isn’t the first time a regional carrier has stopped flying so there was a level of contingency planning.
“However, even with the experience of everyone involved, this has all happened exceptionally quickly. As an Island, we have a debt of gratitude to Loganair. I’ve never seen a flying programme get up and running in 36 hours.
Mr Farajallah added: “Just to be absolutely clear, we have not simply taken two aircraft out of the Loganair pack and brought them down to Jersey; we don’t have two aircraft sitting around doing nothing.
“Equally, that is not to say that there was a long-held plan to bring aircraft down here. We’ve just bought some wet-lease additional capacity into our network – we arranged that on Friday night and contracts were signed on Saturday morning,
“We’re not offering a full service today or tomorrow; we’re offering a partial service, and that will improve and increase as our crew resilience and aircraft resilience increases.
“But right now, we’re responding to a call from the Jersey government. We’re in the early stages of setting this all up, and I’m just delighted to have been here to help.”
Mr Farajallah continued: “In many ways, this is what Loganair does. We had to do it two weeks ago when Eastern Airways went into administration. There seems to be some noise about contingency planning and bringing new aircraft into Jersey but there is a much wider picture: which is that the UK regional airline scene has lost two really good airlines that were populated by fantastic, dedicated friends and professionals.
“It was simply a case of expediating existing plans. We have just started flying new routes from Southampton, which is part of our South of England plan, and we announced Jersey – Southampton as a core route, which we did straight after Jet2 announced they were pulling off Bournemouth – Jersey.
“Overall, we think the Jersey market is a wonderful market. We think Islanders deserve to be connected to places that they can get to and reach to today, but also other places.
“We will be doing some detailed route and performance analysis with the team here at Ports of Jersey, and we’ll be building a schedule and moving forwards and building our presence here over the next few months.”
At the moment, Loganair have launched flights between Jersey and Southampton, Exeter, Bristol and Guernsey. When it comes to inter-island flights, Mr Farajallah said he thought there was room for both Aurigny and Loganair.
He said: “I think what resilience means for passengers is that you are better with some choice. Our fleet size of nearly 40 aircraft gives us some scale that is not present currently in this market. But right now, my sense is that those core routes, particularly those that carry passengers for medical reasons, need to be served with resilient, dependable services. That’s key in every sense.”
Asked if this was a significant day for Loganair in its 63-year history, Mr Farajallah said: It is a really interesting question because it is tinged with the obvious thoughts for colleagues and friends, and I’ve known a lot of the people at Blue Islands for many years.
“We don’t take any joy in flying services that have been vacated by people that we’ve worked with for decades. My first thought is: these are good people.
“My second thought is the pride in my own team at having raised their game and stepped up to the call to arms on a Friday night, having worked tirelessly through the weekend and now having seen two aircraft arrive full of highly enthused and excited crews
“They are not excited for any other reason than they are bursting with pride to carry passengers around the Channel Islands, showing them what Loganair can do. So, it’s a mix of emotions and there’s no celebratory tone at all. This is simply professional and all about execution.”
Loganair have launched recue fares and several routes but, just a few days since Blue Islands stopped flying, the Scottish airline is still building its timetable.
Mr Farajallah said: “I would expect by next weekend to be 70-80% through that piece of work. We can assume some commercial metrics that we’re not privy to at this point in time, but we’re going to have to do our normal route analysis and due diligence to establish what the profitability and the metrics will be on every route.
“I would imagine 75% will be completed in a week and 90% in a couple of weeks from now.
“What is very important now is we don’t have a rush of blood to the head and make a decision that puts us back in any sense, or promises something that we then can’t deliver.
“This is all about incrementally putting schedules on sale that we can definitely fly with a Loganair promise of resilience. That is key to me at the moment.
“Both Ports of Jersey and ourselves have been besieged with people asking to fly certain routes at certain times, and a lot of clamour to get people back onto routes that they were sold and were expecting to fly.
“We are slowly putting that back in place with today’s first flight. Today, we have put down a marker in the right way by getting aircraft here quickly and starting the key routes.
“Remember, this is the second regional airline failure in two weeks, so there is something to be said about being cautious. Of course, we have a very different scale size: we are a company with no government or bank debt, we have a strong financial position with low gearing, high fleet ownership and asset management, and a completely different model to some of the smaller, subscale businesses.
“They had built in problems which you don’t have with our scale. Having said that, nothing is taken for granted. I would say we are financially conservative, and we do need to make sure that every decision we take doesn’t take anybody backwards.
“That said, I don’t think Eastern Airlines or Blue Islands did anything wrong: they simply didn’t have the scale to break through the financial barriers that exist in our industry. We’re all hit with the same things: bigger companies have more resilience, and it is as straightforward as that.”
When asked about how Loganair were being incentivised, Mr Thomas said that was a commercially confidential arrangement. Concerning debts left behind by Blue Islands, he added that that was also confidential, but Islanders should be assured that Ports of Jersey remained in a strong financial position.
