Originally Posted by
boeing_eng
The BAL 737-200 fleet was becoming extremely maintenance intensive (which was the primary reason for their withdrawal)...
Which were then all sold on to Ryanair who didn't seem to have any difficulty with the costs or reliability of running them for on high-utilisation 10-sectors a day type operations that the aircraft had never seen before in its life (far more so than Britannia's two round trips to the Med a day and leisurely turnrounds). The last Britannia 737-200 of all, for example, carried on for 10 years afterwards with Ryanair.