I’ve covered Air Belgium extensively, partly because I’m interested in start-up airlines, and partly because I was supposed to fly them shortly after they started operations, so was impacted when they rescheduled flights. Air Belgium is a new airline that intends to operate a fleet of Airbus A340-300s between Charleroi (outside of Brussels) and China…
Continue reading: Air Belgium Now Wants To Start Flying To The US
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“though finally ended up starting service as of June 3, so they’ve now been flying for a couple of months.”
I got scared for a second because I genuinely believed it was August for a sec and that senior year was about to start.
How long before they announce plans to fly an A340 between BALtimore, Trenton, Islip & Albany??? 🙂
At least you didn’t have to wait long for someone to replace your favourite startup airline as the most ridiculous idea ever!!
Good luck to them, but I won’t be investing anytime soon!
Chris_IOW - Air Belgium is clearly less crazy than USGlobal... For a start they're actually bringing in money and operating flights!
I'm curious how they're having such issues getting on the GDS's though. Surely that should be a relatively simple task in the grand scheme of running an airline?
After reading about htis new airline, I wondered what had happened to Sabena, the long time flagship carrier of Belgium.
Seems they went bankrupt and dissolved shortly after 9/11
@Lucky I thought their second destination was going to be Wuhan or was I wrong?
With all the 787 issues I would imagine wet leasing rates have gone through the roof, seems like they'd make more money just going that for now
@david. Sabena was a victim of McKinsey and bad management at Swissair, which follow McKinsey's notorious "Hunter" strategy of taking stakes in other (money-losing) European airlines. Sabena imploded with Swissair post September 11, 2001, and the Swiss government's reorganization of Swissair as SWISS, via Crossair, did not include a reorganization of Sabena. Swissair management were accused of looting Sabena. Belgian investors picked up the pieces of Sabena and formed SN Brussels Airlines through Sabena's Delta Air Transport subsidiary. SN Brussels later merged with Virgin Express to form Brussels Airlines, which was then acquired by Lufthansa. More recently, Etihad has attempted to replicate the "Hunter" strategy and may yet end up merging into Emirates after leaving a trail of failing investments and airlines (Darwin, Air Seychelles, Air Serbia, Alitalia....).
Basically the first 5 paragraph is repeats of former posts. And yes, the whole article is 10 paragraphs. Good read!