Foreign…..

Air UK were always a reliable little airline. I remember my first flight was onboard their Fokker 27 from Guernsey to Southampton when they operated from that shack in the airport’s former days before British Regional. Service was always good plus I was offered a cockpit visit, which I sadly declined. I remember the aircraft boarded from the back and there was metal caging at the back and all the luggage was visable, strange feature I had not seen before.

No, the best charter livery is Air Transat/ Star Airways…I can’t believe it is always overlooked!
On the EAL subject, don’t you think the title looks very Virginish?

Nectar Miles is my rant of the week. I have tried to book flights for a spotting trip to London in July. Flybe. has offered me £63.00 for a one-way flight to London Gatwick, fine though for the return back to Guernsey for two people it is going to cost nearly £300 including taxes. I am not paying that. So I changed dates as they always say be flexible, got a brilliant price of 12.00 one-way. Excellent, this would work out for a return trip just under £99.50 including taxes for two people. Wow, that is pretty good though I continued to search for the free flights they advertise but surprisingly didn’t find any.
I was going to take the £12.50 offer when I remembered the nectar card points that promised free flights if you have the correct number of points. Okay, it would be free much better than £12. So Monday morning a phone call to Nectar resulted in being told we don’t have seats on the day you want and subsequently any other dates around that time. Great, so I missed the good offer and I am now back to £63.00 one-way. Not good.

Just annoys me that these cards claim to have good offers but when you want them you can’t get them. It is the same with profile points and Air Miles. So there is my rant of the week.

On Internet, Cable & Wireless charge me 1p a minute and the service is pretty slow and poor, so Internet connection is also a joke. AOL were always good and charged a set £15.99 until I had to start paying extra money if I went over 36 hours because there were problems with the local telecommunications company.

The Piaggio P.180 Avanti built in Italy is what you saw I believe 😉

I think they would like a continuation of a current service, possibly Shanghai?

Virgin does want to fly to Australia, just think of the potential for Pacific island connections if/when Virgin Blue goes international plus for Australian regional, it would be a lucrative business.

The sticking point at the moment I believe is the routing through Hong Kong. Virgin need to have permission for the right to fly between Hong Kong and Australia. Cathay are not happy and if it were to happen would like to be able to fly London-US.

Okay, okay….Air UK was largely a regional carrier so there aircraft and routes were largely just blended in with KLM UK.

Air UK Leisure, that is the one you are after I believe, was taken over by the holiday company Unijet. This company subsequently was taken over by Air 2000’s parent company First Choice so the routes were obviously just blended in with the Air 2000 charters. There were no real changes because it was your average charter carrier, same destinations as Air 2000 etc so they fitted pretty well.

Air 2000 took over Leisure International’s fleet asa they were a good match both operating near enough the same aircraft. The only aircraft that was not taken was the A330 after evalution, Air 2000 saw the 767 as a more reliable aircraft for their operations. Some of the aircraft in the Air 2000 were ex-Air UK Leisure aircraft.

Answer your question?