Originally Posted by
Mooncrest
Thankyou for your continuing contributions all. It seems like anyone who had a 732 was fair game for this market, unless they specifically chose to exclude themselves. Pan Am at Palma alongside Dan Air and Spantax isn't easy to picture.
I recall multiple Pan Am 737s at Palma from Berlin on a Saturday as well. The internal German flights reduced notably at weekends and having the aircraft to hand at Berlin slotted in nicely. For some reason the German market never went for the UK tradition of fully overnight flights (depart 11pm, Med destination in the small hours, back at 6am), and so they did mass departures on the nose of 6am when their airports opened (of course, by the time the UK 8am departures were coached to the beach, all the sunbeds were gone ...
)..
Regarding the charter "offshoots" of mainstream scheduled carriers, these often used mainline aircraft and crews, the charter arm being more for marketing. I certainly went on "Austrian Air Transport" on a 'student charter' (a whole separate topic of the era in itself), Gatwick to Vienna, and everything was just a straightforward Austrian Airlines DC9, operating in marginal time. BEA/British Airtours was a bit of an exception to this, although off-season a lot of their capacity went the other way and could be seen at Heathrow on schedules.