Somehow the news was both shocking and unsurprising, all at the same time. Shocking certainly, for the staff and passengers of Blue Islands, who began to see rumours in the media that the airline was stopping all its flights, early on Friday evening – only for it to be finally confirmed at 21:53. It was not to be the weekend any of them were expecting.
Blue Islands’ CEO himself said to staff in an email last night how shocked he was at what had happened. Which does suggest that the announcement was not planned, and begs the obvious question as to what exactly went on Friday to move from an airline which was openly recruiting on Thursday for multiple positions, to one which grounded its entire fleet a day later?
I say “unsurprising” only in the sense that we believe Blue Islands still owed the government around £7m from Covid support, with debt repayments seeming to have stalled this year; and it had clearly been struggling this summer with delays and cancellations.
As is explained later in this special edition, the JEP also understands that even more public funding had recently been provided – and then on Friday, following a meeting of the Council of Ministers, the government decided that enough was enough, a decision which seems to have led to the airline abruptly ceasing its operations by that evening.
The timeline of events which led to that demise needs close scrutiny and full transparency.
Loganair have already, thankfully, stepped into the breach, and as a larger regional operator in a business where scale is crucial, that may well bring stability for local air travellers.
But the speed at which that happened also confirms there was considerable activity going on behind the scenes in recent weeks, which then exploded messily into the public domain on Friday evening, leaving passengers and staff scrambling to process it all.
In this special edition of the JEP there is plenty of advice from the Consumer Council to help the thousands of passengers with bookings on flights which will now never take off; including many local sports teams who relied on Blue Islands’ services, and depending on how they paid for them, will now be worried about getting that money back.
There is also a round-up of everything we know so far, and analysis from industry experts as to exactly what might have happened – and what it means for local travel, which has had one of the most disruptive years in recent memory. It’s a year which will see transitions from both long-standing ferry and flight operators – that brings some positivity as to how the new operators will perform, but also an underlying concern at the instability of it all, particularly since we rely fundamentally on the quality of our transport links.
Of course, it was never supposed to end like this for Blue Islands. The airline began with just one aircraft in 1999 as Le Cocqs Airlink, originally set up just to fly perishable supermarket goods from Bournemouth to Alderney.
It started offering passenger tickets on that route in 2002, before rebranding as Rockhopper, and adding services to Jersey and Guernsey too, in competition with Aurigny.
Later, acquired by Healthspan, it became Blue Islands, the original plan being to bring in passengers from the UK for leisure breaks in the Group’s hotels in Guernsey and Alderney
So, from its early days as the local challenger brand in aviation – created specifically to compete with the long-established Aurigny – it later became the incumbent on inter-island routes, used by thousands of passengers on critical flights to Southampton and Guernsey.
In its various forms, it has been circling the islands for a generation.
Now it looks unlikely whether we see ever its aircraft in the skies again.
