Originally Posted by
WHBM
BEA Airtours started off in 1970 as a home for the BEA Comet 4B fleet; at the time of the decision in 1969 some of these were only 8 years old, by no means fully depreciated in the books but worthless on the open market, where Dan-Air was only offering scrap prices. IT was mushrooming at 20-30% per year, so the more commercially aware BEA members went for the market. The Comets did the first 4 years 1970-73, and ironically the same aircraft, ARJL, did both the first and last commercial Comet flights. To considerable market surprise they sold out all their capacity of 10 aircraft in their first summer. The last official BEA scheduled Comet flight was October 1971, but Airtours aircraft were a first choice for any substitutes required, out of season, and would turn up back at Heathrow for some time afterwards.
Subsequently they worked through the onetime BOAC 707 fleet, and then (by now British Airtours) the new 737s, with which there was an amount of to-and-fro with mainline, again notably out of season. There would be one or two long haul aircraft as well, such as the 747s mentioned above. They always were heavily based from Gatwick, with one or two at Manchester, and just the odd season from elsewhere, though they did a fair number of W arrangements. BA had ownership of a couple of key tour operators, Enterprise and Silver Wing, plus they picked up a lot of others, such as Intasun, both before and after they started Air Europe. They even got into student charters in quite a way, which in the summer brought marginal time midweek work to many places not on the normal IT horizon.
I think you will find that RN was first to be put through a substantial D check, which cost a fortune and made them decide it wasn't worth doing its compatriots, but being sunk costs they hung on to it. If I recall correctly this got stated in a feature on Britannia in BBC's Money Programme, shot in the Luton hangar at the time it was being completed.