Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
Founded by a poker-playing ex-Virgin exec who died tragically young:
A bit more than a "Virgin Exec", but I know what you mean. It was actually his idea, thought up following the Laker collapse. He called it British Atlantic Airways, but couldn't get finance until he tapped, unlikely at first, Richard Branson for the money. Branson's main contact with aviation at first had been nothing more than his mother had been a BSAA stewardess in the late 1940s. The idea was renamed to Virgin Atlantic Airways, and that explains the name retained to today.
Branson and Fields fell out after a short while, but nothing daunted Fields set up a second operator, that was Highland Express. They got the cheapest 747 on the market. This was originally an American Airlines aircraft which had been rolling round the secondary market since its withdrawal a few years previously, and was renowned around the industry for being the worst Lemon/Hangar Queen there was. There's often one of any type. Highland operated through Stansted as described for some months in 1987, but were plagued by the unreliability and maintenance expense of this 747, and went under at the end of the year. After another couple of years of odd work it came into the Virgin fleet as G-VMIA in 1990, where apparently it always held the operator's record for unscheduled maintenance expense and delays for the next 10 years, until Virgin scrapped it in 1999.