Thanks Oxenos - always wondered why the BY aircraft moved around so much. It added a bit more interest to going on holiday as a kid seeing the name of the plane, it's reg and knowing that you'd come home on a different one! "Amy Johnson" (G-BECG) and Lord Brabazon of Tara being (G-BHWF) being the first pair that I remember flying on!

Actually just got back from a week's holiday and there was a minor (but only a minor bit) of disappointment 25+ years later that we flew on G-FDZY there and back!

As this is nostalgia I also find that it sad that BY pioneered the flight information displays in the 737-200's in the 1980's and these days although the TOM 738's are refitted with digital maps they only seem to use them if they can be bothered. It wasn't used on the return journey this week and with no updates from the cockpit during the 4.5 hour flight it was a bit dull (but I do accept that I may be in the minority liking this type of info but at least it would answer the never ending question from my kids of "are we there yet?"!

" The pilots would do a Daily before the first rotation of the day. This could be done for, I think 5 days, then the aircraft would be rotated through an engineering base of a pre-planned W pattern

This is correct, however, the aircraft would be given what was termed a "Long Haul check" prior to departing an engineering base. In essence, the CSD would be topped up and any wheels / brakes that were getting a bit adjacent would be changed to ensure there would be no routine maintenance required during the planned rotations.

The " W " pattern however, also came in useful for a certain Midlands outstation who were very adept at having an aircraft changed down route and having it returned to another Station, complete with defects, which, once rectified, would mysteriously manage to return to it's original base.

LTN Ops also had a wonderful lack of geographic knowledge at times, with their requests to " just nip up to LBA / NCL as they were only up the road"...:ooh:

"I did wonder how the likes of Britannia, who had aircraft operating out of maybe a dozen bases around the country managed for crew basing."
The majority of Brit's pilots were Luton based, and covered the outstation work as well as LTN's own. LGW, BHX, and MAN had pilots, but not enough to cover the busy summer season. GLA and NCL had a few pilots. These bases were topped up as necessary with LTN pilots. Other unmanned bases ( BRS CWL LBA EDI LPL EMA NWI etc.) were done almost entirely by LTN pilots
The cabin crew set up was similar.
Typically, after reporting at LTN, you got positioned to wherever by taxi, or bus if there were a couple of crews, and then worked out of hotels for 3 or 4 days. Sometimes you got to or from wherever by operating part of a W pattern.
Apart from the cost of transport and hotels, this was wasteful of crew duty days, since after positioning to, say, Glasgow it was straight to the hotel ready to operate the next day, but the positioning day still counted as a duty day.
This continued until about 1991, when an attempt was made to man all the bases with the right no. of people. This was not easy,as the number of flights a base would need to operate would vary from year to year. It also meant that rounding up a crew to relieve one which was out of hours down route could be a problem. A stand-by Captain in Ltn, an F/O in Bristol, a couple of cabin crew here, a couple more there.
I left in the big redundancy of '93/4, so I don't know how well it went after that.