Flybe has seen its share price crash by more than a third this morning after a trading update revealed its full year adjusted profit figure would be “lower than market expectations”.

Shares were trading at 21 pence earlier, down 35 per cent this morning.

The carrier said it has seen good revenue performance in the first half set against the backdrop of increasingly adverse fuel and currency impacts.

Recent trading, however, indicated a softening in the second half of the year.

Flybe now expects profits for the first half of 2018 to be around £9.4 million.

This is despite year-on-year cost increases of £17 million arising from the lower value of sterling and fuel and carbon price increases.

Christine Ourmières-Widener, chief executive at Flybe, said: “We have made progress in driving our unit revenues across the summer season, but we are now seeing a softening in the market.

“We are reviewing further capacity and cost saving measures while continuing to focus on delivering our Sustainable Business Improvement Plan.

“Stronger cost discipline is starting to have a positive impact across the business, but we aim to do more in the coming months, particularly against the headwinds of currency and fuel costs.

“We continue to strengthen the underlying business and remain confident that our strategy will improve performance.”

Flybe’s strategy to reduce capacity to focus on its most popular routes has delivered both higher load factors and revenue per seat.

In quarter two, load factors were up year-on-year by 7.2 percentage points to 86.6 per cent, a record load factor for the summer season.

Passenger revenue per seat was up 6.8 per cent as capacity reduced by ten per cent.