Originally Posted by
WHBM
I believed that many of the pilots on the IGS were from Manchester base. The Super One-Elevens which operated the flights there for their last quarter century, which pretty much aligned with the aircraft's total lifespan with BEA and BA, were based at Manchester, but almost half the aircraft's flying hours were spent over in Germany. Towards the end of the IGS a small group of BA HS748s was set up there as well, to get some minor routes going; presumably these would have Glasgow base crews.
You are absolutely right. Most of the pilots used to fly Viscount before converting on to Super-One-Eleven- same, at a later date, on to B 737. Those feeding into IGS always came from LHR, never from Manchester. Which does not mean crew weren´t based there. BAe 748 and ATP pilots were all from Highlands Division, they were feeding in via Bremen, Hanover, and Muenster/Osnabrueck, same going back. At the latter it also meant a aircraft change, a inbound aircraft coming from maintenance at Glasgow, the outbound aircraft going for maintenance at GLA. Both flights operated via Manchester. There was a cabin crew change at Muenster/Osnabrueck, the routing for the flight was Berlin-Muenster/Osnabrueck- Manchester-Glasgow, v.v. Every Sunday afternoon. The flight via Hanover was at times used for connections via MAN,
i.e. operating Berlin-Hanover-Manchester, then onto a 747 Service to JFK. The first two sectors took almost as long as the flight to JFK.
The reason, why BA introduced turboprops, was capacity on the Berlin-Muenster/Osnabrueck flights. With the introduction of B 737 on IGS, it was impossible to fill the aircraft and make a profit. As there was no other aircraft available to meet the demand, Highland´s 748s were choosen, later ATP. The alternative would have been to drop the service. Ironically the IGS flights had to be given up after re-unification, at a time, when the route was profitable. With 64 seats the ATP was the perfect aircraft for these routes.
The One-Eleven was operated for some more years, the last one I saw, was at Leipzig in September 1990, when it was flying the last trade fair flights.