The sky is the limit as airport says 'bye, bye BMI Baby, hello new horizons'
BRAD Miller is a man who refuses to be negative, no matter what you throw at him.
As managing director of East Midlands Airport, you could forgive him for if he seemed a little glum.
After all, the airport he runs has seen one of its biggest operators – BMI Baby – close down after failing to find a buyer when parent company Lufthansa put the BMI Group up for sale in October.
Tomorrow, the company's last flight will touch down at East Midlands Airport and that will be that; the end of the Castle Donington-based low-cost airline.
And no matter which way you slice it, it is a loss for the airport.
BMI Baby operated 30 routes from the base; it brought in 1.1 million passengers – about a quarter of the airport's total flyers; it employed 450 people whose futures are now uncertain and it regularly flew a fleet of seven aircraft from the airport.
By the start of next week, all that will be gone, but Mr Miller – a softly spoken, sharply-dressed young manager – said he sees only opportunity in the wake of BMI Baby's departure.
I asked him to explain his thinking.
"When the news was announced in May, we saw that it was a huge opportunity for other operators to come in and we had an almost immediate response," he said.
"The first of those was Monarch."
The Luton-based operator to which he is referring confirmed in May that it wanted to base two planes at East Midlands Airport.
It said it would use those aircraft to cover three routes previously operated by BMI Baby; to Malaga and Alicante in Spain and Faro in Portugal.
The airline will be operating three flights a week to Malaga and two flights a week to both Alicante and Faro, as well as twice-weekly services to Lanzarote and Tenerife.
It said the routes would continue at this frequency until October 28, when it will move to its winter schedule, reducing the number of flights so that just one aircraft will be based at East Midlands.
But this will increase to two again next year as the firm looks to introduce another route to the Spanish island of Ibiza.
Monarch's managing director, Kevin George, also said the company was aiming to create between 150 and 200 jobs and would make staff at BMI Baby aware of the potential vacancies.
And Monarch was not the only company to chime in with expansion plans at East Midlands Airport.
Both Jet2 and Flybe have swooped in to announce plans to operate on many of those routes being abandoned with the closure of BMI Baby.
At its height, BMI Baby operated 23 routes out of the airport, topped only by Ryanair.
But Mr Miller said all but six of its routes are now being covered by other airlines.
He said: "The majority of BMI Baby's routes are either operated by existing airlines or tour operators at the airport, or they've been replaced by Monarch or through Flybe and Jet2.com's expansion plans."
Jet2 said it will be basing two new aircraft at East Midlands from summer 2013, by which time it hopes to have doubled the staff it had based there from 100 to 200.
From next year Jet2 will also run new routes to Dubrovnik, Menorca, Nice, Ibiza, Larnaca and Gran Canaria.
But despite all this positivity, the summer has been hard at the airport.
Once BMI Baby announced in May that it was to cease flights this month, the firm immediately down-scaled, dropping from 30 to 24 routes out of the airport, with key flights to Edinburgh, Paris and Amsterdam being axed.
Mr Miller said: "These are popular, busy routes and they are also important business routes. There were a lot of people calling the airport, asking how long this was going to go on for.
"They couldn't get out to the places they needed to and that was hard for us."
He described the impact of the loss of those routes on the airport as "painful".
"We are set to be 350,000 passengers down at the end of this fiscal year because of the loss of BMI Baby," he said.
"Last year we had 4.2 million passengers through the airport and this year we are looking at four million.
"That is painful, but what you have to factor in is that without that 350,000 loss from BMI we would actually have been up on last year so things are not as bad as they could be."
Mr Miller refers to this working loss as the "BMI Baby effect".
He said one of the big factors in rising passenger numbers this year – despite the "BMI Baby effect" – was the weather.
He said: "Basically, there is a direct correlation between what's happening in the sky outside and what we are seeing in the airport.
"August has been very busy and during the most recent bank holiday we were down half a per cent on the previous year, and that's taking into account the BMI Baby effect, so it is fair to say it has been a strong summer."
In any other year, the series of expansions and introductions made at East Midlands Airport would have indicated a huge upturn for the base. Against the loss of BMI Baby, however, it is still only mitigation.
But Mr Miller said the faith and belief airlines had in East Midlands Airport had been confirmed.
He said: "The thing to get excited about is that while we have lost BMI Baby, we have gained a new airline in Monarch and had several companies vouch for us by choosing to expand their services at the airport.
"We are back on track in terms of our growth plan. We are in positive negotiations with other companies and there is no reason that by this time next year we won't be right back to where we were."
