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Old 28th Sep 2020, 23:02
  #32 (permalink)  
Flightrider
 
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: UK
Posts: 1,479
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I had a quick check this weekend in the books but didn't have chance to type up the full list. 1985 saw British Airtours bases at LGW and MAN but with some W pattern flying to LBA (including that TriStar on Monday afternoons from PMI, a W pattern from Gatwick) and a Gerona and a Palma rotation later in the week on 737-200s out of Manchester. There were a few other bits of Birmingham and Luton flying that year - all looked to be for Intasun. It had all the hallmarks of a negotiation between Intasun and BTours which said "cover this regional flying for us, and we'll give you our Gatwick large aircraft programme", neatly relieving Air Europe of the need to do multiple W patterns.

Tristar 500 G-BFCE was leased back from the RAF for the latter part of Summer 1985 to cover G-BBAI's absence whilst being fixed up in LBA. Given later events that summer, it was a quite terrible year for any airline to suffer.

The MAH-BHX-MAH TriStar on Fridays went through into Caledonian days as well. That was a couple of years before the proliferation of the Peach Air and Air Ops Europe TriStars which then started to descend on Gatwick.

Downwind Left has it right with the 747 as G-BDXL in 1984, but G-BMGS did quite a bit longer than that with British Airtours and Caledonian - it was painted in full Caledonian colours so went on until at least late 1989.

The 737-200s were a relatively short-lived rarity in Caledonian colours, although they did look good.

Of the Britannia 737-200s, G-AVRN soldiered on for many years after its three sisterships had left the fleet. I never really understood why, but it seemed to find a home in semi-retirement flying the Britannia scheduled service between Luton and Belfast International which ran for a few years. It depends on how old you are, but most did venture reasonably far north in the earlier days. G-AWSY and G-AZNZ were the only two which I recall were rarely seen in the north. The others even including the two ro/ro aircraft (G-AXNA and 'NB) did appear fairly widely throughout the network. [The even more worrying thing is that I can still remember most of the fleet names 35 years later. Captain James Cook, General James Wolfe, Henry Hudson, Robert Clive of India and Charles Darwin, for the five aircraft just mentioned. You could never name aircraft like that nowadays - I'm sure many would be towed off and chucked into Bristol docks. Good history lesson though.]

But enough! Back to British Airtours....
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