bmi diamond club - BD8851

Noted at EDI on Friday 9th:

BD8851 service to TFN, scheduled departure time 10:40am

I noticed this flight listed on the departure board and being curious I ventured over to the Costa coffee concession at International departures and on the way took a look out of window. Sure enough, sitting at stand 3 was an Airbus A321 in BMI colours (old livery)

I cannot find this flight listed in BMI's current schedule. Could this have been a specal charter?

British Midland have done holiday charters for as long as they have existed. In recent years they have dedicated a couple of A321s to this (last summer they were MIDC and MIDJ) with 215 seats instead of the 195 seats in the Heathrow fleet. One of their major bases for this work is Dublin. In addition to this they use spare time on the scheduled fleet as well, usually overnight or Saturday afternoon/Sunday morning. These include a handful of flights which are the only holiday charters out of Heathrow.

In recent years, although summer charter flights have held up well, the bottom has dropped out of the winter market. BMI have picked up a contract to base an aircraft at Edinburgh this winter for the holiday companies, but it is pretty thin utilisation, just one trip a day to the sun, if that, leaving in the morning and returning in the evening. The programme from Edinburgh is:

Monday - Las Palmas
Tuesday - Tenerife
Wednesday - (nothing)
Thursday - Lanzarote
Friday - Tenerife
Saturday - Alicante
Sunday - Malaga

FLight number BD7000 to BD8999 are normally charter flights.

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for discussion