GCI is now ACMI central. A DAT AT7 sits by the tower, op for Blue Islands. The VLM F50 currently sitting outside Anglo operating GR's 2x daily LCYs is now also accompanied by the first company D28. As previously mentioned the Van Air L4T is now based ACI.
five zero by ortac, on the one hand - good shout, it might well be cheaper to use the latter exclusively rather than press on with the BN2s but the whole point of getting it down to the islands was to ensure continuity/reliability of service for ACI. One aircraft, Tris or otherwise, can't hope to fulfil that requirement and hence the Van Air charter.
AFAIK the L4T, BN2s (and increasingly the D28 - and D28s when the next machine arrives) will operate in parallel until GR are fully ready to tranfer the burden onto the D28s exclusively. This may take some time and as such the BN2s will probably operate well into Q1 2015.
Skippy, if you book SOU-ACI-GCI-DNR-GCI-ACI-SOU (overkill, I know...
) sometime in the next couple of months you're bound to get at least one flight on a BN2.
Malthouse, re whacking another machine down from the UK as soon as aircraft go tech, it's much easy to find an aircraft which will do what the E95 and AT7s do (Titan and Cello amongst others exist for that very purpose) than to find an aircraft to do what the Tris does as its bread and butter. You'd have to ring Citywing and fly an L4T down from IOM, Logie for a DHT all the way from GLA or maybe Skybus for a DHT from Scilly (although their spare capacity is generally thin on the ground). For the day. Not easy to justify compared to the cost and convenience of sending a 733 down from LTN for a few runs.
Jerbourg,
EK77WNCL,
five zero by ortac,
EGHQ and
Wycombe, the problem from GR's point of view with despatching JOEY off to Duxford I think comes from the clamour of local opinion which wants him kept in the islands. MD reputedly favours a pole outside GCI airport, although after five years you can imagine what it'd look like. Keeping him flying is a fairly controversial and very extravagant use of taxpayers' money, especially in light of the recent protest over proposed tax measures. There was a plan a while back to send JOEY up to Solent Sky museum in Southampton, but we'll have to wait and see.