Originally Posted by
bisonrav
I just discovered, thanks to someone putting flight data together for Gatwick, that my first flight ever was on a Comet 4B operated by BEA Airtours to Corfu, KT912, on May 10th 1971. Return was KT913 on May 24th.
In 1971 I believe that BEA Airtours was running 9 Comets. Two were based at Manchester, and all the rest at Gatwick. I also recall they were effectively sold out for the summer season with full utilisation (as full as you can do for such older aircraft), not quite certain how it would have been in May. Flights into other UK airports were generally just as a W from Gatwick, and there weren't too many of those either. It was a very Gatwick-centric operation. Principally holiday IT flights, of course, but they also got well in with midweek "student travel" charters to mainstream cities like Frankfurt or Madrid as well, in the days when scheduled service fares were notably high (I used to think how many of the passengers looked rather old to be students).
The Comets did have an upside, as Dan-Air also found, that their range was greater than the One-Eleven commonly used by others at the time, allowing them to handle Greece and The Canaries quite easily.
BEA started a mass-market holiday company called Enterprise, who were Airtours' best customer, and they also had a more upmarket brand Silver Wing, who used to use scheduled services from Heathrow, but progressively slipped in more Airtours flights from Gatwick, especially as BEA mainline gradually gave up Mediterranean holiday spots - on some of which they were still using Vanguards. Airtours also did well with consolidated flights for multiple smaller holiday companies, arranged through brokers, and could be found doing bits of work for quite a few of the other travel organisers of the era. They seemed to have a further niche in such charters to the socialist resorts, Yugoslavia or Bulgaria, that were not operated by the home airline from there, possibly by using BEA mainline contacts.
I believe the commercial management were a real gung-ho lot, who found the freedom they were given was a breath of fresh air away from their previous stodgy job progression back at mainline.
I did understand that in one or two deep winters BEA mainline suffered one of their regular Trident shortages at Heathrow, and the Comets came back to help out, having of course been billed well beforehand as withdrawn from scheduled services.