Here's a reply I made in a previous thread on why VS shouldn't buy it:
You have 4,500 staff to pay redundancy to
You have aircraft to sell at probably below book price
You have to sell slots in a depressed market, and a glut of them
You suffer the bad publicity
You spend all your management time on a non core activity
You have to cancel people's flights, their holidays, their trips
to dying relatives
You have to run the airline at a huge loss (est. 200m this year on
1bn sales) until you manage all of the above
I may be wrong, however I agree BMI has no future, SMB did a bobby dazzler in exiting when he did ... yes, I foresee BMI becoming a rump and selling assets until it withers away. It's a sad , but inevitable thing however VS's best strategy is to watch it happen and pick up slots for a song.
There's a plane at JFK, to fly you back from far away
all those dark and frantic transatlantic miles