Jeez you arent half persistent. My reference to to so called "lack of facilities" was in reference to EK 777 ops only- as you well know.
You still think you know better than airline profit makers....?

American Trans Air 2001
http://www.orlandosanfordairport.com...ses/5-3-01.pdf
Photos: Lockheed L-1011-385-1 TriStar 50 Aircraft Pictures | !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
European, Travel City Direct (and I think even Britannia have done a few) have all operated from EDI to Florida. You would think the way you are carrying on that there was some great conspiracy. Facts are facts, profits are profits and supply meets apparant "untapped" demand.

Also Air Transat dropped Toronto recently as well, surprising given the amount of GLA options on that one too.

The Florida flights ran from EDI to MCO from at least 1997 to around 2001, when it switched to SFB. These were run for a company called Transatlantic Vacations sister company to Laker Vacations, which eventually became Travel City Direct. From memory they were weekly, and were operated by American Trans Air on L1011's and operated via Gandar or Bangor.

BY operated a series of flights to Orlando over the winter of 1997/98 for Thomson Holidays from EDI, although these were not weekly.

Air Transat operated to YYZ from EDI for Globespan Holidays (long before it became flyglobespan) on Boeing 757's then on the A310.

One season EDI had two YYZ flights (2004 ?) with TS operating one for Globespan Holidays and TCX for Canadian Affair (before they were bought by Transat AT) and thats not to mention the YHM on GSM.

Air Transat even ran an ABZ - YYZ in the late 90's

The High Street travel trade have a vested interest in keeping it's long haul leisure eggs in the GLA basket. Aided and abetted by BAA's insistence of providing facilities and incentives at one airport and not the other. I say once again if the vested interest and insistence were EDI-centric we would see
the current exclusive GLA long haul programme outperformed. Make no mistake it's obvious that BAA have designated both airports for their current roles..a fact that prompted the Competition Commission to demand BAA sell
either GLA or EDI.

For the really sad folks the history is as follows:

Orlando

1996 ATA 10 flights
1997 ATA 16 flights
1998 ATA 3 flights
1998 Britannia 3 flights (SFB)
1999 ATA 2 flights
2000 ATA 4 flights
2001 ATA 3 flights (SFB)
2002 European 3 flights (SFB)

Toronto

1991 Nationair 15 flights
1991 Canada 3000 23 flights
1992 no data
1993 no data
1994 Air Transat 20 flights
1995 no data
1996 Air Transat 24 flights
1997 Air Transat 25 flights
1998 Air Transat 24 flights
1999 Air Transat 24 flights
2000 Air Transat 23 flights
2001 Air Transat 24 flights
2002 Air Transat 22 flights
2003 Air Transat 22 flights
2004 Air Transat 22 flights
2004 Thomas Cook 24 flights
2005 Air Transat 25 flights
2005 Thomas Cook 24 flights
2006 Air Transat 26 flights
2007 Flyglobespan 24 flights (YHM)
2007 Air Transat 26 flights
2008 Flyglobespan 18 flights (YHM)
2008 Air Transat 8 flights
2008 Skyservice 13 flights
2009 Flyglobespan 17 flights (YHM)
2009 Air Transat 22 flights

Flight is defined as a departure so there are roughly the same number of arrivals (but not exactly !!)

Make of this what you want.

Ex

"GLA long haul programme outperformed"
Again it seems, for some reason, youre the only one with a vested interest in that particular aspect.:rolleyes:
Let us know when those who are really in the know have listened to your expert advice....

Delta at EDI
 

I'm with CabinCrewe on this one. Joe, you are not in the know about Delta at EDi. The Atlanta and JFK flights failed because the loads were insufficient, especially at the front end. Not a new phenomenon with Scottish transatlantics, with UAL, AAL and NWA all citing the same thing. The DAL flight to Atlanta was a much different proposition to the 757 to JFK. The suggestion that the connection was too late is bollox, even at its latest departure time, 1345L at EDI, it got to ATL in about 7:45 min, often less. That's roughly 1630L at ATL, plenty of time for the evening wave of departures to virtually all of the continental US.

Remember the 767 was scheduled at 1145L, even as early as 1120L at times.

In the summer, loads were very good, often a full load of (from memory) C36 Y197 or thereabouts. Several issues though. Freight loads were very healthy, often 2 pallets in the front, maybe 3 cans in the rear. When full, typically 4 or 5 cans in the rear, with some late freight and bits and bobs in the bulk hold. However, when this was the case, in maybe one out of two cases we'd have to lose a pallet, or a couple of cans of freight, usually if the temp was above 20C, or the runway was wet. Delta, I understood, were sticklers for the performance charts. An easterly departure (IIRC) seemed to work against them even further.

In the winter, you'd have a different problem - no pax! Typical load of maybe 120 all in, and they seemed to have plenty of staffies travelling on freebies, or cheapies, policy was to upgrade if space available, so a winter load of C36 Y90 was not unheard of. Worst load I saw on a 76 was 20:eek: Plenty of weight available for freight though:ok:

I didn't work the 757s, obv no palletised freight for them, so it would all have been down to pax numbers to make it work.

So please don't post troll-like stuff, Joe, ask the right people and you will find the reasons. Your anti GLA stuff is well documented, trying to disguise it with assumed knowledge isn't the right thing to do.

OTEA

Very strange because one of the first things the then Delta Station Manager said to me was that they were unhappy about the arrival time into ATL and the knock-on effect for connections. I always thought ATL was a difficult one to fill especially in the winter but some of the loads were very encouraging and had Delta actually done some advertising it may have been even better. I guess we will never know.

I am not sure there is anything "strange" about it. A unstable small station job was bound to provoke biased appeals from someone whos job may have been on the line..
I find it very hard to believe that on a prime international route which you are claiming was a money spinner that the arrival time could not have been adjusted. Some people must really think airline bosses are idiots.
Did we satisfy your interest in EDI-Florida operated flights ? you never did say...

As a former, fairly regular user of the ATL service, There's a few things I'd tend to agree with.

Firstly, the timing, in the latter part of the service, was a major pain for connecting flights. In the early days, the Delta schedule had the EDI flight arriving about 45 minutes to an hour before much of the connecting flights out to the rest of North America. so there was no real problem with meeting flights. But the big problem with this was that it arrived at the same time as another four or five european flights which caused a bit of a snarl up with stands and for the passengers at immigration at times.

Later on, when Delta changed their schedule, the flight came in pretty much all on its lonesome from europe, being as I recall about 30 minutes clear either way of the next nearest flights. That solved the stands problem and made immigration, baggage reclaim, customs clearance, re-check & security clearance almost a wlak-through. The big issue with this arrival time though was that it was just after / just as one of the waves of connecting flights left. There were still plenty of connecting flights to catch, but this involved a wait of at least a couple of hours.

I used to quite enjoy the layover in Atlanta of a couple of hours before my connecting flight to Houston. It was long enough to get a bite to eat and stretch your legs before the two hour hop across to Houston. However, the main nationality on the flight was American and, as a species, they don't have a great desire to wait about when travelling, so the net result of the change in timing was to provide a service which just basically irked most of the people who used it.

Secondly, as more than one lot of cabin crew attested, the EDI service was never advertised in the US. In the time I was in the states during the time the service ran, I saw plenty of Delta adverts for services all over the UK, Ireland & Europe, but never once saw it mentioned or the route even shown on a map. It certainly got little in the way of general advertising here. In fact I only discovered it existed from the BAA website & only saw a billboard for the service go up here in my hometown of all places in the week that the service finished.

Thirdly, I recall hearing that that there were some issues between DL and CO over priority for stand access at EDI. When CO's EWR and DL's ATL were scheduled closely I think that there instances where the two could be trying to get access to the same stand at the same time & it's possible the re-scheduling of the ATL service might have been an attempt to avoid this.

I did enjoy this service when it was available, but now it's gone & I'm left (still) with a platinum card for Delta & no way to use it.......

Donkey, stands were never a problem for the COA and the DAL. Believe me, they got priority over everything else at EDI. Even if there was a tech aircraft causing, on one occasion, the COA to go remote, it was towed across to the main stands pronto, and the tech aircraft quickly punted remote.

DAL was normally assigned stand 4, reason being that the Delta printer/software ran from there, but stand 2 was also equipped, and was B763 capable. COA usually went to stand 3, or 2 if Delta was on 4.

Of course, anything bigger than a B764 would have been a big issue, fortunately neither DAL nor COA ever sent anything larger.

OTEA

After the CO 752s were fitted with winglets, I heard that they would no longer fit on stand 3. Is this true and, if so, was that the reason that the DL moved to the later time slot?

Anything bigger than a 763 had to park on a remote stand and the passengers brought to international arrivals by bus.

I agree with Donkey 497 regarding the timings. When it moved to its later slot, there were connecting flights still available but all those that I found arrived at the onward destination around midnight. By the time I would have collected my bags, picked up a hire car, driven to my hotel, unpacked and got ready for bed it would typically have been 2 a.m. As a result, I always chose alternative routes. I'm sure I wasn't the only person who avoided the flight because of the later timings.

Another problem that DL had was that when a flight was departing from stand 3, the DL on stand 4 could not disembark because the corridor from stand 4 to international arrivals cannot be used when a flight is boarding at stand 3. This caused frequent delays for DL. This has been a longstanding problem with the design of the terminal yet nothing has been done about it.

Despite what OTEA says, I am aware of several occasions where the DL had to wait a considerable time for a suitable stand to be available. This can happen on occasions at any airport. Whether it was more of a problem at EDI than elsewhere on DLs network I couldn't say.

Cabincrewe. It certainly was not an unstable small station job. The chap in question had worked for DL for a number of years and was also in charge of LGW which at the time was a large station for them. I therefore assume he knew what he was talking about having such experience within the company.
As for the MCO flights, I did not realise there has been so many but I still maintain no airline has tried the route on a regular basis, the most seems to be 1997 with 16 flights, that works out to one a week over a 4 month period. Judging by the number of connections I see every day of the week via LGW , MAN , EWR etc., I still say there is a huge untapped market.

The wingspan is slightly too big for the stand, it can be used but has to be marshalled on and the interstand clearway between stand 3 and 4 closed off. It's not ideal and was used a last resort.
I doubt that had anything to do with DL's schedule though. I can't believe they had a 4 hour ground time in EDI by choice and whatever the reason is it won't have been down to EDI I'm sure.

CO alone regularly have more than 100 pax per day going to MCO in the peak summer months between the 2 flights. There's no doubt that route is crying out for a regular, reliable, non stop service.

Nice one
 

Seriously professional landing in heavy gale at EDI tonight when diversion seemed possible - my thanks to LGW crew and flight deck of BA2946
:ok:

EDI - C17 circuits
 

Did anyone else see what looked like a C17 circling over EDI and Edinburgh city centre on Thursday 10th or Friday the 11th last week?

To my knowledge a rare sight over those skys.....

Any ideas what it was doing?

It was on excercise with the Typhoons at RAF Leuchars doing circuits round Fife as it was also flying over my house (NE Fife)

Flybe are operating a charter for Tui Travel and Olympic Holidays from EDI - CFU for Summer 2011. Running every friday from 6th May through 21st Oct.

Think the CFU flight is now TOM

BE is listed on Thomson, First Choice and Olympics websites as operating the flight, unless they have not got around to updating there websites.