Spanish charter airlines
 

Covid and lockdown has brought some interesting threads from a happier time when Orion had a300’s, IEA were around and Aviogenex were still flying!

in 1987, flight international ran a feature “Spanish charters go up market” focusing on how air europa, Hispania etc were changing The Spanish market. Previously it had been dominated by Iberia and Aviaco who by all accounts were ropey at best but UK tour operators had contract Spanish carriers for a certain proportion of their flying I think.

did anyone have any experience these airlines at their worst / best and in particular obscure ones such as universair and nortjet.

My first flight was on a transeuropa caravelle but can’t remember anything about it.

Did you have the Spandex experience ? Coronados smoking away, and that was just the passengers inside ;-)

I flew on the DC-9 and DC-8 aircraft, but both flights were flights for Iberia due to AOG somewhere. I also remember seeing the DC-10 at LHR doing a flight for Viasa sometime in the late70's/early 80's.

[QUOTE=SpringHeeledJack;10750819]Did you have the Spandex experience ? Coronados smoking away, and that was just the passengers inside ;-)

Ha ha. My dad’s friends flew to TFS from
Ncl on an Aviaco DC9 and the flight report was that the crew spent the whole flight behind the curtain smoking!

Never flew on any of them, but how's this:

Not long before Spantax failed, I was on the ground at Las Palmas, about to board when an "Airfield Emergency" was called. A Spantax Coronado was about land with its left main gear retracted. The aeroplane duly appeared and landed on 21L The landing was textbook. Wing held off for as long as possible, then carefully put down. Minimal damage I believe and as we taxied out for departure, you could see the aeroplane was slap bang on the centreline, about 10-15 degrees off the runway heading. Calmly and professionally handled, left me with a high impression of their operation.
I believe the aeroplane was repaired and went back into service, probably only a few weeks before they stopped flying.

I've never flown on any of them but I do remember. The earlier ones such as Air Spain and Transeuropa didn't use Leeds Bradford but, after the runway extension opened in 1984, they began to appear. Aviaco, Iberia, Futura, Universair, Oasis, Hispania, Viva, Spanair, Spantax, Iberworld, Volar, LTE Espana. And Air Europa, which is still with us! In the UK at least, such airlines were more often seen at the smaller airports operating flights for Thomson Holidays, Intasun and so on where the likes of Britannia, Air Europe and Monarch didn't have a base.

Never flew with Spantax but I did fly from Zurich to Heathrow on a Swissair Coronado - I recall "Coronado" on the fin and telling mum "we're going on Concorde!". The Coronado probably eventually passed to Spantax and my reading skills improved a little...

They certainly were dirty birds weren't they?

Dirty and quick ;-)

Seemingly according to Wikipedia only 37 built...
That is why I guess I have only vaguely heard of them!

there’s still one at Palma I believe. There are Attempts to restore it to its Spantax glory days I think (albeit non-flying)

Great story! I seem to remember that Spantax tried to roster the same crew together for as many flights as possible. Kind of a “military” way of doing things. Can anyone confirm?
Not to say that that had any bearing on the outcome of this incident.

About 100 when combined with it's older slightly smaller sibling, the 880.

I believe it remains the fastest production subsonic airliner.

NASA still had a CV-990 flying up until the last few years.

And here's one getting going (as I know that most of us have nothing better to do at the moment :-) )

I used to think Aviogenex sounded so continental and romantic

Spantax Coronadoes
 

I remember a CV990 tyre burst at BOH. I was in 102 hangar and the bang rattled the doors. I don't think that happened very often.
I also remember twice seeing the Spantax flight take off from runway 17 with strong southerly winds. Only 4800ft long.

Spending my formative years under the approach to Manchester Ringway's 24 I clearly remember Spantax Coronados, or should that be unclearly? Air Spain DC8's, Aviaco Caravelles. I think both Spantax and Aviaco went on to fly DC9's. Iberia didn't really make an appearance and there were only rumours of Trans Europa visitors in the dead of night. From the other end of the Med I remember JAT 707's, 727's and DC9's; Inex Adria DC9's and Aviogenex TU134's. The Tupolev's were really easy to spot on the approach with their anhedral mainplanes. :8

Flew many times with Aviaco on the DC9 and DC8. Always in the rear as my father liked to smoke. Could hardly see three rows in front of you!

Also flew with Aviogenex on the 727 (I think).

My earliest memory though was with good old Dan Air. The Comet - 4C How's that for noise?

My first experience was also a Dan Air Comet from Venice to Gatwick in 1969 & of course still have memories of that flight!

I, too, witnessed the CV990 taking off on 17 (what seemed like 3 or 4 times) in the 70s - it must have been between '73 & '76 - from the College of ATC. Very impressive : & noisy & smoky ! The College was at the end of 17 - just about opposite to where the 990 lifted off !

The interesting Spantax approaches continued even when they started to re-equip from the CV990s. Those who witnessed one Spantax 737-200 approach into a wet UK regional airport on a very murky Saturday afternoon won't easily forget it, and that must be some three decades ago.

The most unbelievable thing after ATC had hit the airfield crash alarm as it had touched down with barely 2,500ft of runway remaining and disappeared out of sight into a cloud of spray with a juddering racket of reverse thrust (as only a 737-200 could) was the exchange with the tower (in direct course for which the aircraft had been flying - probably 30deg off the runway heading - when it broke out of the cloudbase less than a minute earlier). It went along the lines of:
TWR: [hesitantly] "Spantax 746, are you still with us?"
[short pause]
BX746: "Affirmative Spantax 746 - do we have slot time for Palma?"

I've never seen anything like it ever since, thankfully. I know judging yesterday's actions by the standards of today can lead to all sorts of trouble, but a QAR download would even now make a superb CRM training example of when to chuck away an approach. They didn't, and that they got away with it was far more by luck (and Boeing 737 performance) than design. Horrendous. By comparison, Hispania and LAC were a class act. We'll maybe not go into details of the Oasis/Aerocancun MD83 night visual approach onto the same runway a few years later though.

I flew on Spantax and Swissair Coronados. The excitement about flying on the fastest jet was a little muted by not being able to see much out of the window due to the huge protuberances on top of the wing. Still taxying down to 24R in Palma seeing the old girl parked up past the military hangar always brings back memories.

Not a Spanish airline (I never flew on any of them, it was always Britannia, Dan-Air or British Airtours for me in the 70's and 80's), but one of my recollections of a flight to a Spanish location (LGW-ACE) was with Peach Air on an L1011.

We were due to fly (and did indeed do the return) on one of their leased Air Atlanta examples, but there was a late airframe change at LGW onto their standby aircraft, G-CEAP.

I used to fly in L1011's quite a bit in those days, more usually the military ones, but this one appeared more held together with gaffer tape than any aircraft I have ever flown in before or since. The wing upper surfaces were also covered in bird sh1t, which suggested to me it had been parked for a while. Despite appearances, and a few obvious unserviceabilities (I remember the forward hold wouldn't shut and had to be hand-cranked closed) it got us there safely.

On the return, in order for the Air Atlanta machine to make it to LGW non-stop, we had to depart from Rwy21 at ACE (it was a still, warm evening as I remember) and not towards the high ground (volcanoes) to the north of the airfield.

........ a bit like the Aviaco DC9 that requested a visual approach, at night, to runway 05 at Glasgow in the early ‘80s. ATC intervened and instructed him to go-around when they saw him line up on the lights for the Erskine Bridge (just north of Glasgow Airport). He was way off of the centreline and mixing it with high ground.

I didn't witness the infamous Spantax episode that Flightrider is referring to. I did see an extremely late rotation off RW32 at LBA by an Aviogenex 732. I didn't think it was going to get airborne; thankfully, it did but it seemed like it only cleared the 32 localiser by a matter of feet!

In fact, I don't remember any noteworthy incidents with any Spanish charter airlines apart from a Jordanian-registered A320 attempting to mimic a TriStar incident from several years before. Can't really blame the Spaniards for that one - wet lease and all that. R/T standards could be wanting though and clearance readbacks sometimes took a few attempts.

Apart from Air Europa, the Spanish charter airlines never seemed to last very long.

There were not a lot of flying jobs outside of Iberia in that era. The old joke was 'why is an Iberia cockpit like the holy trinity?' easy 'because the son always sits on the right of the father!' The ATC folk may remember in the early eighties that there was a shortage in various spanish units as a lot of people (presumably ex military) got jobs in new local airlines.

At the height of the package holiday boom in the early 1970's Jets were all the rage for the Tour Companies to promote in their glossy summer brochures -

Trabajos Aereos del Sahara SA (TASSA) were long gone by this time but TASSA had developed their most important market with around 70 percent of all charters were to the UK.

By the 1970's the Spanish had Spantax at the forefront who then had mainly CV990's replacing their DC Props
Spantax had a bad crash at TCI with Germans on board, plus a series of other CV990 accidents/incidents

Air Spain DC-8's replacing their Brits
Transeuropa Caravelle replacing their DC-7's
TAE Caravelle 1-11 and DC-8's replacing their DC-7's
Aviaco Caravelle and DC-8's

Italy has SAM Caravelle replacing their DC-6's

Travel Club Upminster chartered Air France Caravelles for Perpignan, Nice and Corsica

Yugoslavia
Inex Adria DC-9 (Bad Yugotours crash with Germans on board over Zagreb)
Aviogenex TU-134A (Bad Yugotours crash with Brits on board at Krk airport)
JAT Charter 707 727 DC-9 (Air Yugoslavia)
Panadria DC-9

Holidays to Greece which was an exotic new destination were flown only on UK charter aircraft as there was only Olympic Airways then which flew to LHR.
Cyprus Airways and BEA mostly flew the holidaymakers to Nicosia as charter airlines were pretty much banned although IIRC BCAL did some VC-10 and 707 charters for Horizon.

Tunis and Djerba were mainly flown by UK charter airlines but I seem to recall some flown by Tunis Air Caravelles

Romania to Consanta, and Bulgaria to Bourgas and Varna holidays (Balkan and Sunquest Tours) saw them use mainly Russian stuff IL-18 IL-62 and TU-154's of Tarom and Bulgarian charters but Tarom & LAR Romanian Airlines used the 1-11 400 too.

Cosmos Holidays in their 1971 summer brochure had a big double page spread banner ''look what we've bought for you'' showing an artists impression of a Monarch Boeing 720B
Enterprise Holidays similarly had a BEA Airtours 707 spread
Clarksons proudly proclaimed ''All Jet holidays''

Two more from the dark depths of memory;

Wasn't there a mid-air collsion between a Spantax Coronado and a DC-9 over France in the early 70s? The root cause was an ATC strike with one aeroplane entering the hold at high level. Can't recall where the subsequnet inquiry found, but the Coronado was recovered into Cognac with a lump of wing outboard of an outboard engine missing. Alas, the DC-9 was lost trgically, but the Coronado's recovery was one heck of an effort.

As for not those airlines not lasting long, in the mid-eighties, Britannia leased a couple of DC-8-61s from a Spanish charter outfit. Islas Canarias might have been the name. Great bunch, always seemed to meet them in hotels down route, very friendly folk. At Gerona late one night, whilst doing the walkaround, as I stood under the tail of our aeroplane on the ramp, I watched one of them land off the ILS onto runway 20. We had tankered fuel in (expensive gas there at the time) and I assume they had too. They must have been heavy. Slight tailwind, gathering mist with a visibility reducing and moist, damp evening air, I watched it touch down. Now, runway 20 is downhill (.8% IIRC) not terribly long and I knew the brakes weren't great. I I knew they were facing a difficult challenge. Howling reversers brought in fast and hard. To this day. I can still see the DC-8 shuddering to halt, going all the way to the end of the runway, having missed the mid-point turn off and, best of all: the engines banging away like mad, shooting great gouts of flame out of the intakes as the reverse thrust was held in until almost at a standstill and the outboards as the engines were re-ingesting the exhaust thrown forward by the reverse. Compressor stalls? Surges,? couldn't tell you, but against the evening gloom an incredible sight. Islas Canarias? I think they packed in after that summer.

You can see this virus lockdown is providing too much internet time!

Take care everyone.

Spantax/Iberia mid-air...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_N...-air_collision

I have a similar recollection, pre extension, involving an Aviaco DC9 at LBA. It had diverted in from BHX on one of those days when LBA was above the fog blanketing much of UK. Pax were bussed up from Elmdon in fairly short order and with I think only 56 on board EC-CTS was cleared direct to Tenerife (or maybe Las Palmas).

I'd swear he was past the 10/28 intersection and must have had that red/white fence bordering Victoria Avenue filling his windscreen when he finally rotated and went up like a homesick angel.....

One of these DC-8-61s? The company later added a couple of MD-80s which wore Canafrica titles.

Them's the ones!

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....5cc9b1245d.jpg
Gatwick Aviaco Caravelle
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....0317264363.jpg
Gatwick Aviaco Dc9-30

May 1972 my second ever holiday flight from Luton with Air Spain on a DC8. Got on board and only about a third full. Flight deck then announced we were going to Gerona via Manchester where we were to pick up the remaining passengers. I thought it was great at the time to get an extra flight. Seemed like a great adventure at the time.
Seem to remember a red and yellow livery.

Anyone remember T.A.E. (Trabajos Aeros E.....)
I think they started with a C-54 then went to 2 or more DC-7C and finally DC-8 s.
Photos much appreciated.
David

Aviogenex (a yugoslav airline as rog747 pointed out) remains in my memory for a trip from Manchester to Dubrovnik via Gatwick. We pushed back and trundled down in the direction of the threshold of 08. At some point a small van with luggage catches us up. The aircraft comes to a stop and sound of number three shutting down and rear hold opening. Swift reloading of our bags which had been wrongly offloaded in Gatwick and we were on our way again. In many years of flying the line I cannot remember anything similar. The 727 we were on had previously belonged to Tito and was one of a matched pair that always flew in tandem. Apparently Tito never decided until the last minute which one he was going on so anyone trying to shoot him down would not know either. The landing in Dubrovnik was somewhat enlivened by the look on the face of the stewardess as we touched down as she was still pushing a trolley up the aisle.

How very strange - some of us stayed late post-shift at Teesside one night in 1984 to watch a Spantax 990 arrive. It landed long and barely managed to stop in time.

YU-AKD and AKH were those two aircraft. Aviogenex got their hands on them in 1983. YU-AKM, an ex-Alitalia 727, joined them in about 1986 or 87. I lost track of their 727s after that.

Back to the Spanish and Aviaco, being an Iberia subsidiary, frequently had the parent company operate the busiest charter routes on its behalf with its larger aircraft. Consequently, Iberia A300s and 727s bearing Aviaco flight numbers and R/T callsigns could be seen at UK airports and perhaps across Europe as well. An Iberia A300 used to operate an Aviaco Palma - Leeds Bradford rotation every Sunday during summer 1986. One Sunday, the flight was operated by an Aviaco DC8-61, still wearing Saudia colours.

Could this be the same incident at GLA that Cuillin Hills is talking about? Go on, you know you want to tell us :)

The MD83 incident was with Otley Chevin on approach to 14 at Leeds. The lights looked like car headlights at full beam on the hillside road, until the lights suddenly roared properly into view as the MD83 climbed rapidly on finals to clear the chevin then dropped like a lift in freefall to re-gain the approach profile.

Now if we're into late rotations, I do recall an Aviaco DC9-33 headed for Tenerife nearly bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "I've got the localiser" as it departed. That said, and for the sake of balance, some of the British Island Airways One-Eleven 500 departures weren't an awful lot better back in those days.

In May 1975 Aviaco DC9 inbound to Belfast Aldergrove landed at Langford Lodge in error.