airblue Planning to Start Flights for UK

[Abbas Ali]

airblue is planning to start flights for UK after the removal of restrictions on Pakistani airlines' flights to/from UK/Europe by EASA/UK CAA.

Abbas

[Abbas Ali]

In the past, airblue operated flights for Manchester from Islamabad/Lahore with Airbus A320 family and Airbus A340 aircraft.





Abbas

[Badar42]

This is even better news than air blue starting Istanbul . I think a321 neo can do this route non stop but what do you guys think ?

[dragonfly]

Airblue has previously wanted a big slice of the cake but will settle for the left over crumbs from MAN.
Perfect size new fuel efficient aircraft but wrong configuration no IFE or WIFI nothing for passenger to do other than trash the aircraft similar to what happens to Jordan aviation aircraft on the said route, should have included a business class with a very similar onboard product to Jet Blue with EFE and WIFI.
With VS on the route they will really need to drop the price just to cover the costs,most likely via a secondary airport in Turkey without traffic rights to UK from Turkey.Golden opportunity missed yet again by a Pakistani based carrier if it materialises.

[adamalikhan]

AirBlue did very well on this route, albeit initially with A321, A320 and even A319. There was a fuel stop in Turkey (Ankara & later Trabzon). Getting off the plan for this allowed you to stretch your legs. There was no IFE but the service was good. With the narrow body fleets, they even started selling flights to Turkey from Manchester and Islamabad. AirBlue even for a period of time allowed you to pay for and pre book an iPad which had entertainment loaded on the same.

They then went for the A340 and this is where the problems started. They could not always fill this aircraft and this caused losses together with issues when the aircraft went technical. Having 4 engines meant there was always some issue going on.

The last time AirBlue announced on their website that they were restarting Manchester flights was when Shaheen made the same announcement. In the end it turned out they had no intention to but wanted to potentially put Shaheen off the idea. There are rumours AirSial and Serene Air are also looking at UK flights, so who knows whether AirBlue is sincere in that it is thinking of genuinely restarting flights when it can, or it is the same tactic as they did with Shaheen.