PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - British Midland Airways, Leeds Bradford to Glasgow flights
Old 10th Jan 2021, 18:37
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Flightrider
 
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: UK
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That's pretty much it.

British Midland flew the Luton-East Midlands-Leeds-Glasgow and various combinations of the routing before Dan-Air then took on Leeds-Glasgow with the HS748, linked to a Bristol and Cardiff "Link City" service. The HS748s were too costly to operate, so along with others including Bournemouth-Birmingham-Manchester-Newcastle, several routes were flown by Metropolitan - latterly under their own brand with a grey and blue "very 80s" look on the Shorts 330s before they ceased operations.

Brown Air then took on LBA-GLA with a leased Shorts 330 (G-BEEO) in probably the ugliest colour scheme anyone had thought up before or since.

The decision was taken for the 330 to be handed back, and to put the Gulfstream 1 (G-BRWN) on a Leeds-Glasgow-Leeds-Cardiff routing in 1986, when the routes from Leeds to Oslo and Frankfurt were discontinued. The re-branding of Brown Air to become Capital then followed, along with the first Shorts 360-300 (G-BNDM) and the subsequent boom and bust of Capital.

When the airline failed in mid 1990, Loganair applied for, and was granted, a temporary licence by the CAA to pick up LBA-Glasgow from 2 July 1990. It flew a 2 x daily Shorts 360 service which later went up to 3 x daily (with a nightstop in LBA for some time) and then a Jetstream 31 operating the mid-afternoon LC295/296 service.

Route licensing disappeared in 1992.

When the big Airlines of Britain re-organisation took place, the route was amongst those which would have moved from Loganair to Manx Airlines Europe and ultimately into the franchise. However, Michael Bishop was not happy with BA branding appearing in what he saw as British Midland territory at Leeds Bradford, so the second round of British Midland operating LBA-GLA began, initially with Jetstream 41 G-MAJA and then with British Midland ATPs deployed at different times. This progressed through to a British Midland Regional Embraer operation with LBA-GLA, LBA-EDI, LBA-CDG and LBA-JER as the core routes with a few others including BRU, ORK, CPH and LIL attempted over time.

British Midland pulled out of the LBA base in 2012. The financial crisis in 2008/9 had undermined the economics of LBA-EDI in particular, and traffic on both routes had dropped hugely. Loganair picked up the route again immediately when British Midland dropped it in May 2012 and flew it for just over five years (so not a bad run!) as a Flybe franchise, dropping it as the transition to Loganair's independent operations began in September 2017.




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