Flybe: Regional carrier ceases trading and cancels all flights https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64436500 https://news.sky.com/story/british-...rading-and-cancels-scheduled-flights-12797178
Can’t see a buyout on this one, we really do need regional air travel, it’s cheaper than a train ffs.
Second time they've gone bust. Sensible train fares would surely be a better solution instead of more regional flights?
Air travel is getting much greener very quickly, however as you say a decent high speed train network would make any overall journey up-to approx 350 miles much quicker by train. But the reality is a high speed rail network to equal European networks is at least 50 years away??? I won’t see it in my lifetime here. Crazy but true. Being half French I remember when TVG started, all of a sudden people were commuting from Lyon to Paris!!! And that is many years ago.
The distances in the UK are much smaller, and the advantages of super high speed trains is comparatively small. HS2 will gain travellers just 15mins on Birmingham to London journeys, mostly because the train doesn't stop to pick people up at as many stations! Better to carry on as now, give everyone a cuppa to fill up the 15minutes they didn't save. and spend the £44Billion on something useful? Your French side of the family have got it right, most regional flights are now banned. https://www.euronews.com/travel/202...et-onboard-with-these-spectacular-train-trips Flying will have to go a long way to become even slightly green. The amount of energy used to carry so few people makes it almost impossible to realistically achieve and this is worse over short distances.
Which is true to a certain extent. Electric regional planes are not so far off, also using solar energy. France is looking to use train over plane on journeys of 3 hrs or less. Quite sensible, but Plymouth to Edinburg or Newcastle is a train nightmare isn’t it? At the end of the day HS2 makes sense the further the line goes, it should follow both the east and west coast lined up into Scotland with a few west to east routes, but we will be long pushing up the daisies before that happens. So until then plane is a workable method. Modern Regional propeller planes are now quite frugal.
Last I heard electric prototypes 'planes "could" be available in 2028, then they will need certification etc. I'm not holding my breath. Plus how much power will they need to operate? It still seems like an unsound approach but my knowledge of this is minimal. Still I agree a train trip to Edinburgh from Plymouth has little appeal! Maybe if they had sleeper compartments!
1981… Since then the high speed tracks network (LGV) has greatly expanded. Problem : it is all « radiating » from Paris. And to keep it time worthy, it can’t stop too often. As our great leadership spent the last 20 years in a steady effort to dismantle the rest of our train network and all the cool services that used to come with it (night trains, cars on trains, etc.), if your not living in or commuting to Paris, you are pretty much left with something less functional than 40 years ago… Things seem to be moving back to a national network not only for les Parisiens, though. We’ll see. As far as electric planes are concerned, flying being my professional background, I can’t see those being used for commercial passenger flights anytime soon. In the air, reliability (no breakdowns) matters more. A lot more… What if they didn’t torque the alternator nut enough, huh?
