Adria Airways Rombac 1-11
 

Anyone remember these ?

They operated a few summer seasons, mainly out of Ljubljana, in the mid-eighties. I flew on one to and from LJU from LBA in 1987, YU-ANS, to be precise. I believe the pilots came from Tarom, who also supplied the aircraft, with cabin crew from Adria. I could be wrong. Said aircraft seemed to have seen better days but wasn't that old if I remember rightly.

Those were the days ;)

It was aircraft #403. Adria, still a Yugoslavian operator then, who had a very seasonal operation, leased several of them in Summer 1987, when they were certainly cheap on the market. The aircraft was fairly new when you rode it, first delivered to Tarom in summer 1984. By 2000 Romavia, the Tarom charter offshoot, was finished with it and it was dumped at Bucharest, where it was still laying derelict some years later.

The best-known leases of this fleet were to Ryanair in Dublin at the same time, they started off the jet services to Luton, Liverpool and elsewhere, and as described Romanian flight crews operated them. In 1987, which was before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was great competition in Romania to operate a contract based in The West, and several of the test pilots from the ROMBAC factory got jobs at Dublin. I'm sure their flying skills were the best but their English wasn't, and they were shortly prohibited from making PA to the cabin, except in an emergency. Pity poor ATC.

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Adria...1RC/0294139/M/

That's the girl. Remarkable to think she was only three years old when I flew on her. Must have been a hard life with Tarom in those days. I remember on both flights the cabin crew did all the PA stuff and we didn't hear a word from the pilots at all. Maybe they were forbidden by Adria from speaking to the pax but they seemed happy enough as they walked across the concrete at Ljubljana after the flight.

Adria in those days was not the airline of the same name we know now. They were a Yugoslav charter carrier with an HQ in Ljubljana, but their main operational centres in the summer were at Pula and Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic coast.

Strangely, for an Eastern European socialist country, Yugoslavia had several holiday charter airlines. Adria, then badged as Inex-Adria, had been around since the early 1960s, initially with secondhand DC6Bs, then DC9s for many years. Another charter carrier was Aviogenex, who used Tu134s for some 20 years before moving on to Boeings. Air Jugoslavia was further operator, who used leased capacity from the national carrier JAT. All were regulars at UK airports at weekends from the late 1960s to the early 1990s; virtually no UK charter carriers got a look in at flights to Yugoslavia.

After the civil war and breakup of the country, when these airlines all disappeared from view for a while, Adria re-emerged as the national carrier of Slovenia, operating scheduled services out of the capital Ljubljana, while JAT became the same out of Belgrade, now in Serbia. Aviogenex hung on with oddball leasing contracts but eventually disappeared.

These charter carriers would have been poor economic prospects under western accountancy because of their short summer operating season and concentration on low-price markets. They did a bit of leasing in the winter (notably to Arabic carriers) but much of the fleets stood idle. Leasing the One-Elevens from Tarom for the summer was an attractive alternative for Adria, but merely transferred this problem to the Romanians. In any event the Tarom One-Eleven fleet did a very low number of hours while in service.

That One-Eleven, incidentally, has the basic Tarom red livery, with just titles and logos adapted to Adria.

Anglo Cargo Airlines, the UK Stansted based, freight airline that went bust, fleet included a 757PF and a Romanian registered 1-11, with the reg YR-BCR.

Here's a link to another photo of the Inex-Adria machine, at Leeds/Bradford:

http://www.bac1-11jet.co.uk/images/4...ord%201987.jpg

Just a thought about the 80s and the Yugoslav charter airlines practically having the market to themselves. For a spell in 1983, Britannia Airways operated a series of flights to Pula from Leeds Bradford (before the runway extension was completed). On every flight they used the same aircraft, a 737-200 dry-leased from Transavia, reg PH-TVP, painted in an all-white scheme. I don't know which tour operator was behind these flights but I would guess Thomson, probably testing the market or daring to queer Yugotours' pitch !

It was to be another two years before Yugoslavia was to be served from LBA again, but this time in the guise of JAT 707s and DC9s.

There was also the Tarom 1-11 that flew for BIA as well with the reg YR-BRA.

Dan Air also operated a Rombac 1-11 (YR BRD) in their full colour scheme in 1989

As an aside, I believe the Transavia 737 PH TVP was subchartered by Britannia rather than dry leased. Aircraft was crewed by Transavia, both flightdeck and cabin crew, with a solitary Britannia cabin crew member - I flew on this aircraft from BHX to CFU in September 1983.

I flew for Ryanair Europe which was the charter division of Ryanair based in Luton .
We had one Rombac. Some of the flight decks were Romanian but never captains.
They were very friendly and easy to work with.
I flew for Ryanair Europe in 1989. It was the rebranded London European. We had 2 1-11s, a Rombac and a BAC1-11 475.
The Rombac was only 2 years old when I joined but looked terribly old inside.
Both were registered in the uk.
We sometimes had one from Ireland coming to help and could fly on it although it was registered in Ireland. The one they used to send was EI-BSS which was terribly unreliable....the bad sheep of the fleet.

The Ryanair Europe Rombac was G-BNIH.

I think the -475 (actually a 476) was G-AZUK with G-AYOP the hangar queen that sat in Hangar 62 as a 'christmas tree' for all those years.

I didn't realise the Transavia 737 was a wet lease, not remembering the Dutch accents on the RT at any time. Still seems a bit of an oddball route to have served from an airport (LBA) whose charter flights were, at the time, virtually exclusively to Spain with Britannia, Air Europe, Monarch and Orion.

Speaking of white 737s, 1983 also saw Air Europe operate G-BKRO through Leeds Bradford, usually on Sunday afternoon to Palma. The leased Air Florida machines were regulars at the time as well. Must have been one of those occasions when AE were shorter than usual of normal capacity.

Wish we still had these airlines around and Aviogenex, Inex Adria and so on. The UK regional airports were more interesting then.

DanAir briefly operated a service MAD-LGW, I'd guess 1989/1990. I flew that route quite often, it was usually operated by the ROMBAC.

The Romanian aircraft took for ever to be manufactured, the UK production line had been shut down for years by the time they were finally completed, and they were only turning out a handful per year; I believe all the remaining parts had been shipped over there from BAe and then possibly lay around in warehouses for a long time. They would also be of significantly old design in the first place.

Newcastle 'came alive' at a certain point in the mid-60s when, from nowhere seemingly, appeared regular DC-6 operations by Adria and a couple of Spanish operators. Up until that moment, registrations other than G- had been an extreme rarity and so had been visitors of that size.

Recall arriving by bike early on Friday evenngs and as I mounted the crest on the approach road the tips of one - two - three DC-6 tails becoming visible on that tiny apron on the Woolsington side. Of course the Ian Allen books didn't even have the charter fleets listed so you had to carefully pencil them in.

God, I'm getting old.

The good thing with the 1-11 generally was the build quality. Typical British belt and braces design and construction (which turned up in similar form on the DC-9), as used on the equally tough HS748 and Viscount. Just a shame about the rather underwhelming Speys. Once the Romanians took over production, the design and powerplant were of a previous generation so I suppose the aircraft were bound to look dated, to western eyes anyway. As WHBM says, YU-ANS was only three years old when I flew on her but she looked like she'd been around much longer.

Aviogenex must have been laughing when they got their hands on the pair of 727s from the Yugoslav government in 1983. Still in production, reasonably new and undoubtedly with relatively low cycles on the airframes. They, and the machine acquired from Alitalia, turned up all over Europe in the following decade, along with the JAT 727s. Did JAT ever use their 737-300s on their Air Yugoslavia charter work ? I don't ever remember seeing them, usually the 727s, DC9s and the 707s for a spell.

An ex-colleague of mine, formerly Chief Pilot for a flag-carrier that operated a 1-11 fleet, called them the most over-engineered aircraft in history - 'machined out of a solid block of aluminium' was his phrase.

Consequently indestructible, but horribly heavy.

It was around the same time occasional foreign airliners started to appear at Leeds Bradford but only on sporadic IT trips. Pan Adria and Sabena did the honours with their piston props. The likes of Braathens and Euralair appeared towards the mid seventies and eighties, again prior to the runway extension, but using 737s. In the meantime Aer Lingus was a regular with their (then)new 1-11s and later the 737s. Otherwise, LBA's traffic was probably very much as at Newcastle with BKS/Northeast, Dan-Air and the like. It was at least 1985 before the Spanish and Yugoslav IT airlines came along. And where are they all now ??? A shame in some respects. :sad: The Spantax 737 landings were often a sight to behold.

'Foreigners' at NCL in the 60s, before the DC6s started arriving, were Daks of Rousseau (F-), Schreiner (PH-) and Wideroe, the latter carrying lobsters. Braathens Friendships with ships crews (not much call for that traffic in LBA) and short inbound charter programmes in Summer by Convair 440s of Kar-Air (OH-) and Finnair.

I don't recall the JAT 737-300s picking up any of the holiday charter work either, they seem to have stayed based at Belgrade on scheduled flights. The first one was delivered in 1985; by this time the Croatian-based holiday industry was already starting to fall out with the Serbian-based JAT from Belgrade, and I get the feeling that JAT pulled right back from Dubrovnik and Pula holiday operations before the overall carrier fell by the wayside for a few years in the 1990s.

Incidentally those 737-300s are still an intact fleet with JAT (they were leased out during the civil war, but all came back afterwards), and nowadays are still daily visitors into Heathrow and similar major points, where they fall among the oldest daily visitors.