bmi in its hayday
My first memories of bmi was flying Viscounts between Belfast Aldergrove and Gatwick, proclaiming itself as an alternative to the "monoply" that BA had on domestic and short European routes while fighting like mad to get in to Heathrow. This it slowly did whilst acquiring DC9's and building up rountes from LHR to Dublin (in competition with both Aer Lingus and BA), Belfast, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool (short lived), Leeds, Teeside. East Midlands, Paris (both Orly and CDG I think), Brussels, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. It also did a lot of summer charter work from virtually all UK airports to the Channel Islands. Regional routes were also operated - Aldergrove to East Midland and so on. Birmingham seems to have been a base at one time. Fleets included F27's and SD360's.
In the late 80's the B737's arrived (remember the B737-400 disaster at Kegworth). The Channel Tunnel seemed to kill Paris whilst Star Alliance membership meant Frankfurt was left to Lufthansa. Meanwhile a vigerous campaign for long haul routes from Heathrow, particularly to the US was waged but other than shortlived Chicago, Toronto (for Air Canada) and Washington (very short lived) and a couple of leisure routes all from Manchester, nothing ever came of those big plans. To me that is when the rot started to set in.
9/11 obviously did not help and left bmi struggling even to find the cash to repaint its planes in the new livery, hybrids lasting several years.