So a UK based airline goes under with lightning speed leaving customers high and dry, and the regulator to dish out advice to its customers as an emergency.

It’s unacceptable that this situation keeps happening. The same thing happened with flybe going into the pandemic – a complete collapse – and after re-emerging last year now it has happened again. The airline has earned the booby prize in aviation as a repeat failure.

As usual, customers are faced with the stark reality of a formal statement on the airline’s website and a basic tweet. Instead of a chirpy breezy hard or soft sell home page promoting air fares and destinations, the mask slips and all the bright purple branding is replaced with a ‘Notice’. It’s a very harsh wake up call to customers checking on bookings, or even en route to the airport to take their flybe flight. As usual, the regulator has to pick up the pieces, along with credit/debit card issuers who will be faced with a flood of requests for chargebacks from affected customers.

Eventually someone has to pick up the tab for this. Questions need to be asked: why was an airline allowed to continue trading right up until the early hours of the day it announced its demise? There seems little scrutiny and oversight on the corporate journey of failed travel and airline businesses who have a public track record of previous failures.

Should the airline have ever restarted the business under a new owner yet again? If you look at flybe’s history there’s a pattern of management and ownership churn and opportunistic corporate grabs going back decades. In fact it’s a convoluted chaotic testament to loopholes and practices in the air transport sector leading to a game of diminishing returns. Ultimately Flybe became a shell of an airline morphing like a shapeshifter with varying profiles of ownership. It picked up the pieces and routes of previous airlines and retained the name and brand of flybe but really it was acting more and more like a charter operator.

Notwithstanding the fallout to customers, there are all the other livelihoods affected, crews, pilots, maintenance and handling support staff at all its bases in Belfast, Birmingham and Heathrow. The airports also have to regroup and manage the gates and slots the airline was planning to use. With no notice at all these guardians of the infrastructure used by the airline will have to crisis manage their own schedules and assets to compensate.

Of course there are mitigating factors: the weak pound, the disproportionate double whammy of Air Passenger Duty hiking up ticket prices for all UK operators, Brexit, increased competition as the air transport industry recovers from Covid, the high cost of aviation fuel caused by the war in Ukraine – but the airline industry is a cyclical one – and always faces and weathers even the toughest challenges.

There are also winners – rival airlines that will pick up the slack – offering reduced fares to abandoned flybe customers, as well as the rail operator (LNER has generously offered to fly the failed airline’s customers for free).

It’s an opportune time now for government and the aviation regulator to re-evaluate its role in preventing a repetitive catastrophe – espeically when it’s the same airline repeating mistakes over and over again.

And as the UK government is hot on its political messaging with the levelling up agenda at the moment, it should really think about how to distribute connectivity throughout the UK, to remote communities that rely on Public Service Obligation routes and the lifeline that regional UK operators offer. For despite its flaws and failures, flybe did at least have a very valuable and ethical role – in linking up and levelling up the UK from Northern Ireland to Newquay. It’s this role that must be preserved but with much greater regulation and scrutiny.

And just one more thing – what if there’s a third iteration of flybe on the way? What’s to stop that happening?

Instead of the branding ‘let’s flybe’ it should be ‘let’s never flybe’.