It's a continuing theme of this Blog to report the increase in airline consolidations, where airlines are disappearing, merging or being acquired. Today we learnt of one which is due to combine the best of British Regionals (Flybe) with the undoubted long-haul expertise of a major European carrier based in a small home market (FINNAIR) to create a new direction for an established but small Nordic regional airline (FINNCOMM - Finnish Commuter Airlines).

Flybe, Europe's largest regional airline, and Finnair  have together agreed to buy Finland's biggest domestic carrier Finnish Commuter Airlines  for 25 million euros in order to expand in the Baltic market.

It will be interesting to see how this venture develops as FlyBe are very ambitious, but the Scandinavia/Baltic markets at which they are now aiming have strong competition in the form of Norwegian (low cost) and Air Baltic (flag carrier of Latvia operating regional routes with a mix of low fares and business orientated services). If it works, then we expect more of the same in other European regional markets with route pairs which don't have the traffic volume to attract teh likes of Ryanair or Easyjet.