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Aviation History
1973
1973 - 1865.PDF
: ^^^MMHj « 'OLa* J^,,r STPP I .IIMS STERLING Airline Profile: NUMBER FORTY-FOUR IN THE SERIES THIS YEAR MARKS the start of the second decade of operations for Sterling Airways of Denmark, and sees Europe's largest charter airline consolidating its position. This has to be seen against a background of increasing costs, more and more intense competition and charter rates that have increased more slowly than almost anywhere else on the continent. If, in its eleventh year, Sterling appears to have decided against further growth in order to concentrate on improving its profit margins, it could well be because of the spectacular rate of expansion in its first ten years. These saw the airline's fleet grow from two ex-Swissair DC-6Bs to 27 Caravelles of different types. The number of passengers carried has increased to, nearly 2-4 million in 1972 and the number of revenue passenger-km generated has grown to 4-2 thousand million. Sterling's first flight was on July 7, 1962, carrying 93 holidaymakers from Copenhagen to Las Palmas. It was the result, incongruously, of an unsuccessful coach trip from Tjeereborg, a small Danish village, to Lourdes. Shortly after the end of the Second World War the local priest, Pastor Eilif Krogager, had decided that he and his parishioners ought to take a trip abroad and, in order to reduce the price, he hired a coach. The venture was finan cially unrewarding and lost the Reverend 1,000 Kroner, but, undaunted, the next year he tried again and succeeded. From this experience evolved his travel agency, Nordisk Bustrafik, now the largest in Scandinavia. This, like Sterling, is part of the Tjaereborg Travel Group, which last year provided the airline with some 600,000 passengers. Sterling was started, one is told, because the Pastor "found it would be cheaper if he did the flying himself." In 1963 Sterling started to develop its own maintenance facilities at Copenhagen's Kastrup airport. Day-to-day and line maintenance is carried out at Kastrup, but the major Check Three and Check Four operations are performed at Helsinki and Stockholm. In 1965 two Super Caravelle 10s were bought from" Aerospatiale, making Sterling the first Scandinavian charter airline to operate jets. A year later, in 1966, the airline carried half a million passengers and could boast of being the largest charter airline in Europe in terms of passengers carried. The airline's first subsidiary, the Aero Chef catering organisation, was founded in 1969 and now serves ten other carriers. The same year a single 56-seat F.27 was ordered, to be followed a year later by a second of the type. This enabled Sterling to offer travel agents in Sweden and Norway inclusive-tour services to the Mediterranean from points -unable to support direct flights. Tour operators could then book blocks of seats on services from Copen hagen the day before they were due to operate, and the F.27s were used to carry passengers from Stockholm, Oslo, Gothenburg and Norrkoping to Copenhagen, where they were transferred on to DC-6B or Caravelle flights. By the beginning of 1970 the airline's traffic had grown to 1-3 million passengers and the fleet consisted of 11 DC-6Bs, 12 Super Caravelles and the two F.27s. In 1971 The first of three 727-200s will be delivered to Sterling on October I this year. The 185-seat aircraft, says the airline, may be the largest the Scandinavian tour operators will accept in the near future. Never theless, it has ordered a trio of 345-seat A300Bs for delivery in 1975 and 1976
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