brunos

Air Asia X has flown between Europe and Asia and failed. t is fighting hard for the Asia-Australia market but that is a very different market and I was referring to Europe longhaul.
As NickB points out, Norwegian is a "new" attempt and I hope their business model will succeed. But the jury is still out and it is unclear whether legacy airlines like BA will manage to make them fail outside of Scandinavia, as has been the case for other longhaul LCC.
Similarly, Air Transat has some success but that is in part due to the specific Canadian market. I suppose that we could find some mini examples, but nothing on the scale contemplated.

Starting a separate longhaul LCC out of France using current AF staff seems weird. My guess is that AF will use this "brand" for COI flights plus a few other leisure destinations such as BKK where they already use the leisure config. It sounds simply like putting a specific stamp on existing flights using existing ac. The carrot for unions is the reopening of closed routes.

orbitmic

Because to date, it certainly isn't a success!

olivedel

I laughed a lot when I read that article that did not even analyze the safety concerns that this could raise...

carnarvon

It was saying that they had to look at the safety aspects of this concept.

I guess that as long as beds are not in use during take off and landing, there would not be too many possible in-flight issues with people in beds.

irishguy28

Goldorak

Pilots have voted at 58% in favor of the new BOOST airline long-haul subsidiary. 75% of pilots have participated to the poll.
http://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-...ts-642774.html

San Gottardo

"Good". In "

irishguy28

The result may be more nuanced than just saying "the pilots have voted in favour"....

stimpy

http://www.france24.com/fr/20170220-...agnie-low-cost

So that awful and costly strike was a complete waste of time?

wuzziduzziman

...guess the majority of strikes are a tremendous waste of time.

fifty_two

Lol ! one of the ideas mentioned in this article

Basically thats already the case for Caribbean and Indian Ocean , i guess also some routes to Africa

SDQBound

That was my thought as well. Nothing can be worse than a 77W COI, so I am optimistic about the seating configuration in the new airline.

Ber2dca

Well, given that something like Boost is essentially a somewhat subtle form of union busting, the union were hardly just gonna take the vote and say "that's alright then". Air France will play the game now that BA and LH have already played for years - play your current staff vs future staff.

Also, Air Canada must be peeved that someone's now taken the name "Boost" so they can't use it themselves for some off-shoot or price category for that matter.

San Gottardo

"Good". In inverted commas, because union support for a flawed business plan is obviously not really good.

But good in the sense that the pilots have taken away from themselves a reason to strike against the new venture. And good in the sense that they see the need for change.

brunos

Indeed, the good news is that the pilots finally accept the idea that change might be needed. And that vote despite the opposition of SNPL management. It is more a vote on principles than on details, but that is a good step.

To me this is clearly a long term plan. I think that this is the first time in recent decades that a plan is offered for longhaul. All previous low cost plans only affected medium haul. I heard that some longhaul pilots saw Boost as a way to keep their "avantages acquis", as they think that it will reduce the negotiation pressure on the longhaul mainline pilots.

But it is long term.plan. In the short run Boost will operate with high-operational-cost ac and AF pilots under their current rules and compensation. But one has to start somewhere.
Whether an AF low-cost longhaul airline to Asia is viable is another question.