A big thankyou to Piton and Track for their very informative postings.
Would the original decision to use SOU rather than BOH have been made by the Dutch armed forces or by Transavia Ops? I assume that the troops were enroute to Salisbury Plain but obviously do not know the exact location. The distance from BOH to Salisbury is given as 24.68 miles by Multimap and SOU to Salisbury as 24.27 miles! Given these almost identical distances, I would have thought the longer runway with ILS at either end, and CATIII on 26, would have made BOH the obvious choice.
LT