Around 1,200 staff at bmi will lose their jobs after the takeover by British Airways, the airline has announced.
BA has started consulting unions on how to integrate the remaining 1,500 jobs at Heathrow. It insists that without its £172m acquisition of the loss-making airline from Lufthansa by BA's parent company IAG, all of the 2,700 jobs would have been lost.
Around 1,100 cabin crew, pilots and engineers will become BA employees, with 400 passenger services jobs at Heathrow's Terminal 1 also secured.
Most UK redundancies will come at bmi's head office at Castle Donington, Leicestershire, and at regional airports. The airline promised to mitigate the impact of the job losses by looking at further vacancies within BA at Heathrow and with industry partners in the Midlands, including Rolls-Royce.
Unions have vowed to fight to save as many jobs as possible.
Keith Williams, the chief executive of British Airways, said: "Bmi is heavily loss-making and is not a viable business as it stands today. Our proposals would secure around 1,500 jobs that would otherwise have been lost. As we look to restructure the business and restore profitability, job losses are deeply regrettable but inevitable. We will work with the unions to explore as many options as possible and are already working with industry partners.
"This deal is good news for our customers and will offer new destinations, new routes and new schedules in due course. For customers with bmi bookings to or from Heathrow this summer, it is business as usual and customers can continue to book with confidence."
Prospect, which represents engineers, said the news was a "body blow to local economies" with only the London airport's jobs being preserved. The union's negotiator Richard Hardy said: "Over 400 jobs will be lost in the east Midlands alone, over 100 of them high quality engineering jobs. Not only will it cause personal hardship and uncertainty for the individuals affected, it will also have a devastating knock-on impact on local businesses, shops and communities. There will be similar, though smaller, impacts in Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh."
Unite national officer Oliver Richardson said: "Bmi's future has been secured but we are very saddened at the scale of the job losses being proposed. Unite will be fighting to maintain as many jobs as possible and ensure that where vacancies exist people can be placed into suitable roles within BA.
"We are also mindful of the fact that additional jobs need to be secured at bmi Regional and bmibaby which still face an uncertain future."
The British airline pilots' association, Balpa, said it would allocate all the resources at its disposal to support pilots affected. Jim McAuslan of Balpa said: "Each job loss is a personal tragedy."
The purchase of bmi, which was cleared last month by the European commission's competition regulators, gives BA another 56 daily slot pairs at Heathrow, of which up to 14 will be available to other carriers. The IAG chief executive, Willie Walsh, said the extra slots would allow the airline to serve new destinations, make Heathrow a better hub and strengthen the UK economy.
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