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Old 8th Jan 2019, 22:25
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WHBM
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
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Our usual historic friend Airlinetimetables does not have anything for AirUK, or predecessor BIA.

The Heralds gravitated from the BIA routes, which had been based on their British United predecessor, based at Ronaldsway and Jersey, and to an extent at Exeter, Southampton and Belfast as well. The former Air Anglia routes meanwhile were up/down the east coast, via the various points between Norwich and Aberdeen, with several of these connected to Amsterdam as well. Air Anglia brought F27s to the party, where BIA brought a dozen Heralds. The concept of a network was less prevalent then, you just looked up in the travel agents' ABC Guide where you wanted to go, and who was the operator. It could be either of the two founders, and Dan-Air had an even more oddball collection of disconnected 748 routes, described quite accurately once as the "crumbs from the table" of the BA network.

Almost immediately, AirUK took over the BAF Herald opperations to the Continent from Southend as well, on the commercial side, but subcontracted back to BAF Heralds for the actual operation. They also commonly subchartered Heralds from BAF to cover thier own routes as well.

AirUK standardised on the F27, theit last Herald appears to have run at the end of 1985, including the one now preserved at Duxford in their colours. AirUK used to help Duxford out quite a bit at that time, they would send an F27 down from Norwich to plug a hole in an airshow programme, and when they started the F27 network up from Stansted in the early 1908s (pre-new terminal) represented themselves as the airline of East Anglia.
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