Flybe flight tracker: the airline no longer flies

There are no Flybe flights to track. Flybe stopped flying twice. The original airline, for years the largest regional carrier in Europe, went into administration on 5 March 2020 and grounded its whole fleet that morning. A smaller relaunched Flybe flew from April 2022 and ceased trading on 28 January 2023. Flight numbers beginning with BE no longer appear on any radar. This page tells you what happened to the airline, and which carriers fly the old Flybe routes today.

Which airline flies my old Flybe route now?

Most of the network was picked up by others. Loganair took over a large part of the Scottish and northern English routes, Eastern Airways and Blue Islands added services of their own, easyJet and Ryanair absorbed some of the busier leisure routes, and Belfast City is now served by Aer Lingus Regional. KLM still links a long list of UK regional airports to Amsterdam, which for many former Flybe passengers is the practical way to reach a connecting flight.

The quickest way to find today’s operator on your route is the live departures board of your own airport, for example Belfast City departures, once one of Flybe’s biggest bases. Once your flight is airborne you can follow it on the live flight tracker.

From Jersey European to Flybe

The airline began in 1979 as Jersey European Airways, formed out of two smaller operators, Intra Airways and Express Air Services. It flew from the Channel Islands to the UK mainland and slowly built a regional network. In 1983 it was bought by the Walker Steel Group, owned by the Blackburn steel magnate Jack Walker, and that backing paid for the expansion through the 1980s and 1990s into a proper scheduled regional carrier.

In 2000 the airline started trading as British European, and in July 2002 it was rebranded once more, this time as Flybe. The new name came with a new model: low fares, point to point flying, and regional airports rather than the crowded London hubs. The head office stayed where it had been for years, at Exeter Airport.

Europe’s largest regional airline

The step that made Flybe big was the purchase of BA Connect from British Airways, completed in March 2007. British Airways took a minority stake in Flybe as part of the deal, and overnight Flybe inherited bases, aircraft and routes across the north of England and Scotland. From then on the airline described itself as the largest regional carrier in Europe. It was floated on the London Stock Exchange in December 2010.

At its peak Flybe carried roughly eight million passengers a year across some two hundred routes. It was the dominant airline at Southampton, Exeter and Belfast City, and a major operator at Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Aberdeen and Newcastle. For a long stretch it flew a large share of the UK domestic flights that did not touch London at all, which is exactly the traffic no one else wanted. Its flights carried the code BE and the callsign Jersey, a leftover from the Channel Islands beginnings. The fleet was built around Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 turboprops, with Embraer regional jets alongside them and, in earlier years, BAe 146s.

Why it failed

Regional flying is a thin-margin business. The sectors are short, the aircraft are small, and the fixed costs per passenger for air passenger duty, airport charges and ground handling are high, so there is very little room between a full aircraft and a loss-making one. Flybe made losses for years, issued repeated profit warnings, and by 2018 was up for sale.

In early 2019 it was bought by Connect Airways, a consortium of Virgin Atlantic, the Stobart Group and Cyrus Capital, which announced plans to rebrand the airline as Virgin Connect. That rebrand never happened. The finances stayed fragile, a rescue package involving deferred tax payments was still being argued over in January 2020, and then bookings fell away as the coronavirus outbreak spread. On 5 March 2020 Flybe entered administration. All flights stopped that day, around 2,000 jobs went, and a string of regional airports lost most of their timetable at a stroke.

The 2022 relaunch and the 2023 ending

The Flybe name, brand and remaining assets were bought in 2021 by Thyme Opco, a company linked to Cyrus Capital, one of the investors behind the earlier consortium. A much smaller Flybe took off again on 13 April 2022, with a first flight from Birmingham to Belfast City and a fleet of leased Dash 8 Q400s.

The relaunched airline never got beyond a handful of aircraft and a short route list, and it ran into the same economics as before, this time with higher fuel prices and a shortage of crew. On 28 January 2023 Flybe ceased trading and went into administration for the second time, cancelling every remaining flight. Around 75,000 booked passengers were left to find another way home.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still track a Flybe flight? No. No aircraft flies under the Flybe name or the BE code any more, so nothing will show up in a radar search. If you have a flight number beginning with BE from an old booking, it is no longer in use.

Which airline replaced Flybe on my route? It differs per route, and some routes were never replaced at all. Check the live departures board of your regional airport for today’s operator.

I have an old Flybe booking reference or voucher. Is it still valid? No. The airline’s obligations ended with the insolvencies in 2020 and 2023. At the time, passengers were pointed to their card provider, travel insurer or package holiday operator; the administrators deal with anything that remains.

Was the 2022 Flybe the same company? Legally no. It was a new company that bought the brand and the operating assets, and it used the same name, colours and BE code.

Is Flybe coming back? There is no indication of it. The name has now failed twice, and the routes that were commercially viable have been taken over by other airlines.