Brown Aviation

[KeMac]

After the demise of Metropolitan Airways in the mid eighties, apparently a licence was given to Brown Aviation to operate regional routes but I have been unable to find anything on this outfit. Does anyone know of them - routes/ aircraft operated?

[Soddit]

Brown AIR is probably what you are looking for. Started up at Leeds Bradford with a single SD330 (GBEEO) leased from Jersey European and initially operated on JEA's AOC. It had a fairly meteoric growth and was renamed Capitol Airlines. The rest is, as they say, history.Two names from those days which crop up on this website from those days are Allan Gaunt ( from the beginning, I believe) and Adrian Thompson. If memory serves there was a sector either LBA - FRA or HUY - FRA. Either way it was an amazingly long scheduled sector IN A SD330. Yorkshire pudding with gravy and lots of fresh fruit were served to passengers. Honestly.

[KeMac]

That sounds like it Soddit -many thanks for the info. I got Brown Aviation from the BAA Annual report for 1985/86.

[ANW]

As I recall the parent company started out with a Cessna Conquest [G-MOXY] as its corporate aircraft to commute from Leeds to a location in southern Norway (whose name escapes me) where its dumper trucks were manufactured. The company then decided to sell seats to the general public to help defray costs on this route: hence the birth of Brown Air. As an aside, G-MOXY was later destroyed in a landing accident at Blackbushe.

Further expansion saw the acquisition, as mentioned, of a Shorts 330, and for longer scheduled services a Grumman G159 turboprop Gulfstream [G-BRWN]. The Gulfstream was used on the LBA - Frankfurt via Humberside route. Around this time the core business was in gradual decline, which eventually saw the closure of the parent company and its airline off-shoot.

[KeMac]

Thanks for the info ANW. What is coming out of this is that Brown Air were a very small operation. The story I read in the BAA report was that Brown Air were to take over the routes operated by Metropolitan Airways when they went bust. I don't know how big they were but I had heard of them. What I read was in relation to Glasgow and the implication was that the route/s operated by Metropolitan out of Glasgow would be taken over by Brown Air but it certainly does not look like that was a possibility. Presumably they had a licence but not the means to operate the service.

[Midland 331]

Brown built earth movers in Molde, Norway, IIRC.

They flew Leeds-Oslo with the Gulfstream, I think.

I was working for SAS in the north on the commercial side at the time, we were "curious" as to how they did...

r

[L-Band]

Brown Air started with G-MOXY the Cessna 441 then G1 G-BRWN.
Then started operations as Capital Airlines with a SH360 then ended up with six, then came the Bae146 which we had 2 G-OSKI/G-OSUN. The airline ran for about 18 months then the company (Browns) went bust and took down the airline. A lot of people out of a job including me.

L