Originally Posted by
rog747
In the 1970's and 80's many UK pax flew on DC-8 holiday charter fights ... and for the Transatlantic's from the early Affinity Group charter days in the 1960's flew DC-8's of ... ONA, Saturn, Universal, TIA, AFA, World, and Capitol (maybe Airlift too)
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Those DC-8s of US charter ("supplemental") carriers came a notable way. In the mid 1960s the US military placed substantial contracts for charter capacity to Vietnam, the chosen aircraft was the 707-320C and the three selected operators were Pan Am, Braniff and Continental, all three of whom placed significant orders with Boeing beyond their existing scheduled needs. By the time they were delivered the DC8-63F had just come along, this was seen as better and as there was a break point in the 707 contracts they were let go, obviously to the carriers' dismay. The work was given to the US charter operators of the era (as named above), all of whom then placed orders with Douglas for short delivery, the sales team did well but production at Long Beach got into a right mess, they subcontracted significant elements out but then didn't know how to manage it, ended up with late delivery, penalties, extra costs, etc, and was a significant element of the McDonnell takeover.
The DC8-63F also got deployed on the, then also extensive, US military charters to Europe, West Germany in particular but also Italy, and some even to Mildenhall. The actual operation was inefficient one-way flights, and the US-based carriers (who were by many accounts pretty close-to-the-knuckle operators anyway) then tried, positioning on to the likes of Gatwick or Amsterdam, for return commercial passenger loads among the Affinity Group lot, a somewhat grey market area who were focused on price, and margin. The military contract had a lot of short term flexibility in it, flights would go a day early or late, be diverted just a week beforehand, etc, and the resulting rearrangements were the cause of these return charter departures being rearranged 12 hours or even two days later. In pre-Internet days some US holidaying tourists and students didn't get to learn of this in time, and would turn up at Gatwick to find chaos and no plans for them. It got into the newspapers, I believe eventually the CAA got involved, and the US operators' business fell off again quite quickly.