Who remembers those Friday nights Airtours Holidays multiple Tenerife’s plus a Palma and Saturday nights with a battery of Las Palmas departures on behalf of Sunset Holidays?
The days when we could travel abroad, carefree, looking forward to sunshine, rest and relaxation on foreign shores with an excursion to add a flavour of local colour and culture.
Looking back through my own records back in 1973 it was Aviaco and Air Spain with Caravelles and DC8-21s.
Fast forward to 1975 Spantax used their smoky Convair Coronados on a PMI-GLA-GRO-GLA-PMI Saturday rotation.
DC8-63s made their appearance in the 1980s with Aviaco and Spantax and Hispania began operations with 737-200s having morphed from TAE to Transeuropa using a fleet of Caravelles.
When the Spanish Government, in mid 1980s, wished to increase their xEuropean market share of IT flights to 40% of flights operated by Spanish carriers it generated a flood of new airlines and ownership. Cue Air Europa, part of ILG, Spanair part of SLG, LTE part of LTU and Aer Lingus taking a stake in Hispanic. Some carriers had short lives: Nortjet, Lineas Aereas Canarias, Oasis, Andalusia Air and the infamous Canafrica with that DC8 operating on behalf of Thomson Holidays using Britannia flight numbers.
Nowadays it’s all Vueling, Iberia Express and Air Europa soon to be part of IAG and the Oneworld Alliance.
So who has filled the gaps? Both easyJet and Ryanair have large domestic and intra European operations from Spanish airports together with Eurowings with a Palma base although it’s a shadow of what was once operated by air berlin.
It currently remains unclear exactly how, where and when we can travel freely once more.
Until then it’s back to the log books.
Spanish Airmada
Re: Spanish Airmada
atuk wrote: ↑Sat Jun 05, 2021 9:35 am Who remembers those Friday nights Airtours Holidays multiple Tenerife’s plus a Palma and Saturday nights with a battery of Las Palmas departures on behalf of Sunset Holidays?
The days when we could travel abroad, carefree, looking forward to sunshine, rest and relaxation on foreign shores with an excursion to add a flavour of local colour and culture.
Looking back through my own records back in 1973 it was Aviaco and Air Spain with Caravelles and DC8-21s.
Fast forward to 1975 Spantax used their smoky Convair Coronados on a PMI-GLA-GRO-GLA-PMI Saturday rotation.
DC8-63s made their appearance in the 1980s with Aviaco and Spantax and Hispania began operations with Caravelles then 737-200s having morphed from TAE to Transeuropa using a fleet of Caravelles.
When the Spanish Government, in mid 1980s, wished to increase their European market share of IT flights to 40% of flights operated by Spanish carriers it generated a flood of new airlines and ownership. Cue Air Europa, part of ILG, Spanair part of SLG, LTE part of LTU and Aer Lingus taking a stake in Hispania. Some carriers had short lives: Nortjet, Lineas Aereas Canarias, Oasis, Andalusia Air and the infamous Canafrica with that DC8 operating on behalf of Thomson Holidays using Britannia flight numbers.
Nowadays it’s all Vueling, Iberia Express and Air Europa soon to be part of IAG and the Oneworld Alliance.
So who has filled the gaps? Both easyJet and Ryanair have large domestic and intra European operations from Spanish airports together with Eurowings with a Palma base although it’s a shadow of what was once operated by air Futura and Spanair have disappeared their markets being gobbled up by rapacious low cost competition and hotel chains willing to do dynamic packaging in face of the downturn in traditional tour operating.
It currently remains unclear exactly how, where and when we can travel freely once more.
Until then it’s back to the log books.
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awwdabaaby
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Re: Spanish Airmada
When I worked in the airport as a baggage handler, summer 2000, we has Futura from Mahon I think, we had an influx of flights from Tenerife on a Friday night, normally LTE, operating for Club 2000, then on the Saturday, we had 2 Iberworld from Palma arriving at 08:30ish, then next one would be Air Europa from Gran Canaria at 11:30, then the next one I can remember was Iberworld from Ibiza at half 11 at night
Re: Spanish Airmada
I can remember getting off a BD shuttle andr looking over at international pier and i could count 5 air europa ....