Let’s all raise a toast to those who owned a piece of L’Avion. They became the only (extremely lucky) shareholders of an independent all-premium class airline to actually get money back from their investment. That’s right, the new BA subsidiary OpenSkies announced today that they’re buying L’Avion for a mere 35 million euros.

This marks the end of the latest experiment in all-premium airlines. MAXjet is toast, so is Eos, and despite many rumors, Silverjet is officially done as well. Now that last man standing, L’Avion, is part of the BA empire and will be fully integrated into OpenSkies.

If you had a ticket on L’Avion to fly from Newark to Paris, nothing should change . . . for now. OpenSkies says it will “operate up to three daily flights between Paris Orly and the New York area,” it’s that “up to” piece that makes me believe these frequencies won’t last for long. Right now, OpenSkies flies from JFK and L’Avion flies from Newark. It wouldn’t surprise me if they end up consolidating at some point.

I guess we should have seen this coming when OpenSkies announced a codeshare with L’Avion right when they started flying. But that still begs the question . . . why are they doing this? Beats me. It’s not like they need more 757s, and I’m sure they could have driven out L’Avion if they really wanted to. Maybe they really wanted those extra slots at Orly, but that seems like an awful lot to pay for them, no? I guess I don’t know the going rate.

Either way, we’re going to see a quicker ramp up of the airline than previously planned. Keep an eye out for new cities to pop up from OpenSkies sooner rather than later. I would imagine this will continue to be focused on flights from New York to other points in Continental Europe.

First we had eos and MAXjet, then Silverjet was announced, and now we have the oh so simply named:

L’Avion (which means “The Airplane” in French), is going to begin daily all business-class flights between Paris/Orly and Newark with 100 seat 757s (that’s about half the normal capacity). I’d love to tell you more about it, but, well, there isn’t anything else to tell right now.

The amazing thing about these guys is that according to the press release, they plan on starting flights on December 27. That’s a mere 16 days away, so you’d think that you could buy your ticket right now, right? Wrong again. It seems that they’ll begin business on December 27, but thanks to what probably was not the best translation around, that probably means they’ll begin selling tickets, not actually begin flying. Go to the website and you’ll see a pretty picture and absolutely nothing else.

In fact, they can’t even update the website entirely with the current name. (Look at the page title in your browser.) The airline used to be called Elysair, but after a very scientific process, they’ve discovered that people related better to “L’Avion” so they changed it. Okeydokey.

Somehow, my hopes are not that high that we’ll see these guys flying in the near future.