CityJet

Early years

CityJet was founded in 1992 as Business City Direct and commenced operations in December 1993. In January 1994 it started a single route between Dublin and London City Airport under a franchise agreement with Virgin Atlantic, in which it paid fees and charges to Virgin in order to operate as Virgin CityJet and use Virgin Atlantic's distribution channels. The airline was mainly competing with British Midland and Aer Lingus services from Dublin to London Heathrow and Ryanair services from Dublin to London Stansted. However, CityJet held a monopoly on services to London City until Aer Lingus launched services from Dublin to London City in September 1999.

In June 1995, Virgin CityJet debuted with flights between Dublin and Brussels, competing with Sabena and Aer Lingus initially.

In 1996, the airline terminated its franchise agreement with Virgin Atlantic on short notice and decided to continue operations using its own CityJet name from the end of July that year. By then, the airline flew scheduled flights from Dublin to London City, Brussels and Malaga. The decision to discontinue the Virgin Atlantic franchise came as Virgin itself entered the European short-haul market with budget carrier Virgin Express, and CityJet feared customers could confuse the low-cost carrier with its own full-service operation.

1999-2014: Air France era

In 1999, CityJet was at the verge of bankruptcy. Air Foyle acquired half of the shares in the airline in return for assuming the carrier's debts. Air France took another 25 percent while investing £2 million. Under the new structure, CityJet retained its own scheduled services while also becoming Air France's principal European subcontract airline. However, CityJet still remained a loss-making business.

In early 2000, Air France took over all shares in CityJet and became its sole owner. At the time, CityJet already operated seven out of eight of its aircraft for Air France. The French national airline was allowed to outsource operations of aircraft with less than 100 seats to regional partners and subsidiaries under its contracts with Air France' labour unions; overall savings to Air France by outsourcing regional operations to the Irish subsidiary were estimated at 40 percent.

In 2006, CityJet operated supplemented Air France's operations with flights from Paris to Dublin, Birmingham, Edinburgh, London City, Florence, Gothenburg and Zurich. Furthermore, the airline still operated between London City and Dublin. The fleet consisted of 20 aged BAe 146 aircraft. From December 2006, the airline began replacing them with 23 much younger but similar Avro RJ85s it had acquired in a $221 million deal from Mesaba Airlines.

On 24 December 2007, Air France-KLM announced that it had signed an agreement for a full takeover of VLM Airlines NV from Panta Holdings, and announced on 28 May 2009 that VLM Airlines would gradually start to operate under the brand name CityJet. As of 1 June 2010, the whole VLM Airlines Fokker 50 fleet wore full CityJet livery, although VLM remained the owner of its own Airline Operators Certificate, and the Fokker 50 fleet was listed on the Belgian registry.

CityJet filed a pretax loss of €51.5 million for the year to the end of March 2010. This compared to a €53.9 million loss in the year to end of March 2009. Revenues fell by 8 percent from €282.4 million to €258.9 million over the same period. Passenger numbers grew, climbing by 6.5 percent to 2.1 million, while average fares dropped by 16 percent. Christine Ourmières joined as new chief executive on 1 October 2010. She had previously held a number of senior posts within the Air France-KLM group. In the IATA year ending 31 March 2010, CityJet carried just over 1 million passengers on its London City network.

In June 2012, it was announced that Air France-KLM was considering selling CityJet to support its own ailing business, with a further statement in April 2013 that the winning bidder would be announced in the summer of 2013.

As of October 2013, the operational agreement with Air France had been replaced by codesharing, with most routes operated under its own WX code instead of Air France's. In December 2013, Air France announced it would sell CityJet, including VLM Airlines, to German investor Intro Aviation. The transfer was completed in May 2014. CityJet subsidiary VLM Airlines was bought by its own management and cut itself loose from CityJet. However, they were to remain flying the London City to Antwerp route as an ACMI operator for CityJet until mid 2016.

2015-2018: Transition to ACMI

In October 2015, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) announced it would sell its Finnish subsidiary Blue1 to CityJet and that CityJet would provide wet lease services to SAS from March 2016, with CityJet placing an order for up to 14 new Bombardier CRJ900 jets, 8 firm and six options. Four of the options were later confirmed. In 2016, Blue1 was dissolved and merged into its parent CityJet.On 28 June 2016, CityJet inaugurated its Sukhoi Superjet 100 revenue services with its first scheduled flight from Cork to Nantes.