FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1966
1966 - 0073.PDF
International, 13 January 1966 47 AIR TRANSPORT Good Start for IflterJet T IE number of fare-paying passengers carried on the firstday (January 4) of British United Airways' domestic-trunkservices with BAC One-Elevens was very reasonably encourag- ing for the future. It remains to be seen whether traffic on this day was attracted wholly by the continuing advantageous features of the services—jet aircraft comfort, a more convenient starting point for some, good passenger-service features and marginally shorter city centre-to-centre times—or partly also by the wish of some passengers to travel on the first of a new series of services. Whatever the combined'reasons may have been, the services offered 560 effective seats and 234 of them were filled by pas- sengers who had paid either the full or the stand-by fare— a respectable inaugural passenger load factor of about 42 per cent overall for the four return services. The One- Elevens on the services are one-class 74-seaters; the fact that the number of seats is lower than a multiple of eight is because climb-out obstructions at Renfrew reduce the maximum permissible passenger load ex-Glasgow to 58. This restriction will disappear when Abbotsinch comes into use in May. The highest load factors (guests excluded) on the services were on the first Glasgow-London service (69 per cent, 40 passengers carried) and the return Belfast-London service (72 per cent, 53 passengers). These results are interesting—in the case of Belfast because this is shown once again to be an under-served route, and in the case of Glasgow because 23 of the 40 passengers were stand-bys. These passengers had failed to get on the BEA service and had chosen to try for BUA's InterJet service which, like that of British Eagle, operates to and from Renfrew's subsidiary terminal—which is quite a long way from the main terminal used by BEA. The passenger factors on Wednesday and Thursday of last week . were 38 and 29 per cent respectively, with the Edinburgh ser- I vices showing the poorest results. | In equalling or beating the BEA /Eagle centre-to-centre times, f BUA has to use jet speed to make up for some fairly heavy initial distance disadvantages. The passengers from London's centre may or may not care whether they are joining or leaving the aircraft some 25 crow-flying miles farther away from the destinations so long as the fares are the same and travel times are equal or better. That is not their affair. But BUA has to route its north-bound services eastwards to Sevenoaks and then around London to Brookmans Park. On southward flights the routeing is normally west of London to Dunsfold and Gatwick. All of which involves a lot of extra air mileage. For con- venience of control, too, the BUA domestic flights are normally made at a cruising altitude of 24,000ft—which is not necessarily the best in terms either of economics or block times. The timings of the BUA domestic flights may seem, on casual examination, to be a little strange—with only those for the Glasgow services meeting fully the needs of the day com- muters. The airline has had to work on a very difficult series of economic and timetable planning problems and to try to find the best compromise solutions. The impossible demand was that the timings of all services should meet three different requirements—those of the commuter, the international interline passenger and the Victoria-Gatwick train timetables—while not wasting possible crew and available aircraft working periods. The present winter services involve the use of two aircraft, one of which completes the London-Glasgow-London-Edinburgh- British United's BAC One-Eleven C-ASJJ outside Renfrew's unprepossess- ing Number 2 terminal (below) after its arrival on the inaugural London! Gatwick-Glasgow flight. At Edinburgh's Turnhouse above) there was a surprisingly large crowd of spectators
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
