Kondair Cargo, Stansted, remember?

Hello MSR777,

Thank You for your response. Thought you’d get a kick out of it. Few if any of these flight companies would have lasted more than a few DAYS without you guys and your fine efforts at keeping schedules and cargo going smooth. I hope the owners and their crews acknowledged your commitments in helping them achieve their goals. Thanks again for the reply.

Regards, hiflier.

Now there’s a name from the past. What type(s) did they operate, we’re they involved in night mail work?

we had a similar airline up here at Barrow 1985 to 1988
Air Furness, they had a few mishaps too many for a 1 or 2 plane airline

That is a fascinating link. The Motorola ‘walkie talkie’ in that pic, looks identical to the units that we were using back then. Thankfully I was a traffic officer with our company at the time, and was not involved in actually loading cargo onto the aircraft, but I did once leave my radio on the flight deck of an SAS/Scanair DC8-63, operating a charter flight to Stockholm Arlanda from Stansted. I seem to remember that it came back later the same day on one of their DC9-40s. This earnt me a disciplinary from my D/O, quite rightly I guess. However, I don’t hold the record for the most travelled radio, during the time that I worked there. That accolade went to one of our seasonal traffic officers, who unintentionally sent his radio Stateside, courtesy of a CL44, operated I think by either AEI, or Aer Turas, we handled both at the time. I think that the radio made its return, a few days later……..Ah, happy days:)

Hello All,

Since the anniversary of the supposed collision with the Kondair’s Trislander BDOS in 1984 has passed I thought it would be apropos to tie up that particular loose end. I belong to a UFO Forum that prides itself on rigorous in-depth research into the various aspects of the phenomenon. Since the Trislander case was the only one involving a collision with an “unknown” object in the UK we decided to investigate it. The short story is we solved it. Thought you’d be interested to see how we did it. Enjoy:

http://uforesearchnetwork.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=2896

Thanks for posting those EC. Having trawled my old log books, I do have an entry for me ramping G-RUSH, and it was indeed a Chieftan.

to put some images to the story

The mentioned Chieftan probably was G-RUSH

rgds
EC

I had contact today with my historical reference who states that the next web update will show Kondair forming in 1977 and being taken over by Titan in 1989. 🙂

Well, I joined Servisair back at the end of ’81, and while I admit that I can’t be absolutely sure when we started to handle that airline, I’m certain that they were around prior to ’85. As Flightmech has said, the incident in question took place in ’84, and it was in my early career at Servisair, when I was ‘ramping’ their flights. I can remember that one of the Trislanders back then, was waring quite a garish green and yellow striped livery with ‘XP’ titles, it was repainted in the Kondair silver/blue livery some time later.

UFO encounter!

And the final episode of my investigative flight involves the extraordinary or controversial encounter that G-BDOS had with an alleged UFO. You be the judge!

http://wiki.razing.net/ufologie.net/htm/kondair84.htm

One aviation historical site lists Kondair as being in existence in ’85 and ’86, but one of the previous incidents occurred in ’84 and they were still advertising for pilots in ’88.

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1988/1988%20-%200317.html

I remember watching that Trislander land at STN (minus parts of its main gear) from the open doors of ATEL’s hangar 1

Yup, that was the happy ending ie: he got down alive and in one piece, that I alluded to in my earlier post. The landing was not very dignified so I’m told.

Also in 1986, from a book about aviation in Alderney.

…the same year another Trislander, registered G-LCOC, was acquired. This aircraft was the subject of quite an interesting incident in September 1986 under the ownership of Kondair, a cargo and freight airline with three Trislanders, G-LCOC (then registered G-BCCU) being one of them. The pilot was flying from Amsterdam Schiphol to London Stansted at 1000ft. He nodded off half way through his journey and woke up 10 minutes later. He fell asleep again soon after, but this time the consequences of his ‘lack of attention’ were somewhat worse.
He was leaning forward on the control column, so the aircraft started to descend. He only woke up when the wheels were brushing the surface of the North Sea and so he took evasive action (albeit probably a little dozy!), and climbed back to 1000ft.
When he looked out of the window to check for external damage, he noticed that the right wheel was missing and the undercarriage leg was damaged, but he managed to limp back to London Stansted, where he landed safely… his lesson learnt and his future job prospects grave, no doubt!
As far as I know, the NDB is placed slightly to the right of the 26 approach and far enough back that it does not pose a significant problem.

I would speculate that the aircraft would have returned to Guern so Anglo-Normandy (aurigny engineering) could have a look at it.

And there will be more tomoroow!

Look forward to that.

Yes, that was a sad accident to G-BDTP. 🙁

I will remind you of other incidents tomorrow.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19860914-0

Yes, I remember them well. Back in the early to mid 80s at Servisair, we used to handle them at STN. Their Trislanders looked pretty good in that classy silver, red and blue livery. I’m pretty sure that there was also a Piper Chieftain in the same scheme, which would often perform crew positioning flights for airlines such as Britannia, Air UK etc, as well as newspaper/light cargo charters. Our dealings with Kondair, were mostly concerned with the night time newspaper flights, mainly to AMS, although there could have been other destinations. I can to this day remember the night I put weather paperwork and manifests onto a Trislander newspaper flight to AMS, that sadly crashed with the loss of the pilot. It shocked us all on shift that night, as we knew all the Kondair crews very well. There was another episode concerning a Trislander, thankfully this one had a happy ending, but that’s as far as I go on that:):) I can also remember a very fearsome captain by the name of Phil Jeffries, well he scared the b’jesus out of this young Traffic Officer! But underneath that exterior, he was a thorough gentleman……so long as you didn’t **** up. Both he and the rest of Kondair, became part of the Titan Airways operation………from little acorns:)