News: BMI cancel London to Mumbai flights
Flights > News > # 1042 (30/10/2006)
A technical problem on one of BMI’s Airbus A330 aircraft has forced the airline to suspend its daily London Heathrow to Mumbai flights indefinitely.
BMI is in discussions with Airbus about the reasons for the technical failure, as well as the length of time the aircraft is likely to be out of service. BMI grounded the aircraft at the start of October when a problem with the landing gear was found during a routine maintenance inspection. Since then the airline has not been able to find a suitable replacement. BMI launched services from Heathrow to Mumbai in May 2005.
BMI’s chief executive, Nigel Turner, said: “The marketplace is intensely competitive and we have serious concerns about a prolonged period of over three month’s absence. A sustained absence will place us at a considerable disadvantage against the competition that we face on services to Mumbai when we are able to recommence operations.
“The priority of BMI will now be re accommodating passengers already holding reservations onto alternative services with the minimum of disruption.”
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Comment:
Airbus might be having serious problems with their new Superjumbo at the moment, but there are always replacement aircraft available, even if they might not be exactly suited to BMI's needs. I suspect the technical problem may have been a convenient excuse for British Midland to pull out of a market which they quite rightly point out is highly competitive.
BMI's withdrawal will still leave four other airlines competing on this route - British Airways and Virgin Atlantic from the UK; and Air India and the rapidly emerging Jet Airways from India. Few other cities in Asia have such intense competition for flights into London - Dubai and Hong Kong are now the only destinations served by non-stop services from five competing airlines on flights from Heathrow.
However much the market for flights between the UK and India might be set to grow, there are always going to be some airlines which are in a better position to exploit this than others. When two cities start attracting huge volumes of flights between themselves, these routes are often fed by an extensive amount of connecting traffic at each end. BMI might be in a stronger position to provide onward connections to and from UK regional cities than their rival Virgin, but the two airlines have always fed each other for short-haul to long-haul connections and vice versa, whereas Virgin is already much more established on the London to Mumbai route. There is a huge range of internal connection flights available from Mumbai, but BMI don’t have any codeshare alliances to exploit this. It is also worth noting that if you are planning a trip to an Indian city with no direct flights to the UK, we would strongly recommend flying via one of the gleaming Gulf airports (Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai) with an airline like Emirates, Etihad or Qatar Airways, rather than struggling through Mumbai’s sprawling Sahar (Chhatrapati Shivaji) international airport. Most of the Gulf-based airlines have extensive flight networks across India.
BMI chairman, Sir Michael Bishop, has always had his eye on the US flights market, but BMI have so far only be able to successfully operate flights from Manchester to Chicago and Las Vegas. In the same way that the removal of the barriers which had previously prevented more direct routes between the UK and India has allowed many more routes to develop, BMI will continue to lobby for a renegotiation of the Bermuda treaty which currently prevents them from offering flights from Heathrow to the USA. We would expect BMI to find far more opportunities for both direct routes, and the onward connections which sustain them, on the other side of the pond, where their membership of the Star Alliance airline network would enable them to provide many more links with United in the USA or Air Canada, and fellow European airlines like Lufthansa, Swiss and SAS.
