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Overview
The end of the Second World War not only brought peace to a war-weary population but also delivered a plethora of surplus transport aircraft, crew and engineers, which could be easily and cheaply repurposed to 'lift' the mood of the British population. The dream of sun-drenched beaches in exotic places suddenly became a reality for thousands of pioneering tourists taking advantage of the air-travel revolution of the 1950s. From their humble beginnings flying holidaymakers to campsites in Corsica in war-surplus Dakota aircraft to today's flights across the globe in wide-bodied Airbuses, Flying To The Sun narrates the development of Britain's love-hate relationship with holiday charter airlines. Whilst many readers today will be more familiar with names like Ryanair and Easyjet than Clarksons or Dan-Air, this charming book serves as a fond reminder of those enterprising airlines and companies that ushered a new age of travel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750968706 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 03/07/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Flying to the Sun
A History of Britain's Holiday Airlines
By Charles Woodley
The History Press
Copyright © 2016 Charles WoodleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6870-6
CHAPTER 1
Britain's Holiday Airline Industry: A Historical Overview
In 1938 legislation was introduced entitling workers in the UK to one week's paid holiday each year, but at that time overseas travel was still beyond the means of all but the 'leisured classes', and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 put thoughts of travel for pleasure on hold for the next five or six years.
The return of peace in 1945 saw the return to Britain of thousands of service personnel who had been sent to continental Europe and Asia, and who were keen to experience more of the world and escape for a while from the rationing and drabness of post-war Britain.
The rundown of the RAF in the aftermath of the ending of hostilities released into civilian life a large number of aircrew and aircraft engineers who hoped to continue in aviation as a living. Many of these saw an opportunity to set up their own charter airlines using some of the hundreds of war surplus transport aircraft that were being disposed of at knockdown prices to carry holidaymakers to the sunshine and beaches of the south of France, Italy and Spain.
To do this, they needed to establish a working relationship with a travel agent who could arrange the necessary accommodation and sell the package to the public. One of the first to see the potential for overseas holidays by air was Vladimir Raitz. In 1949 he was a 27-year-old, working for the Reuters news agency when he was invited by a friend to take a vacation at his friend's Club Olympique, a tented holiday village on a beach at Calvi in Corsica. At the end of his stay, Mr Raitz was offered the chance, with some colleagues, to purchase a concession on a large area of beach nearby, and he seized on the idea of operating holidays to it by air.
At that time Calvi possessed an airstrip built by US forces during the Second World War, but it had no airport buildings and there was no direct air service to it from the UK. On his way back from Calvi, Mr Raitz made a detour to take a look at the Spanish island of Majorca, which also had an airfield and was served by flights from Barcelona. Although impressed by the tourist potential of the island, he decided to concentrate his initial efforts on providing holidays to Corsica.
On arrival back in London he made enquiries about chartering an aircraft for a series of flights to Calvi. He was quoted a price of £305 per round trip for a thirty-two-seat Dakota aircraft, but was also warned that he was unlikely to be granted the necessary government approval for the flights as the state airline British European Airways held a monopoly on all British air services to Europe. The fact that they did not operate to anywhere near Calvi was irrelevant. Undeterred, he set up a holiday company called Horizon Holidays, using money left to him by his grandmother.
In March 1950 he was informed by the Ministry of Civil Aviation that approval had been granted for the charter flights, but only for the carriage of students and teachers – a restriction that was to be dropped in later years. Horizon Holidays hastily produced its first holiday 'brochure' (in reality a four-page leaflet), offering tours to Calvi for a package price of £32 10s 0d, flying from the UK and staying in tented accommodation with meals and wine included. Great emphasis was placed on the plentiful quantities of food on offer, as Britain was still in the grip of meat rationing at that time.
In due course, tours to Majorca followed, bringing the first summer tourism to an island which had achieved a degree of fame as the winter retreat of Chopin and George Sand, and had relied primarily on winter tourism until 1951. The airfield at Son Bonet was expanded to cope with the additional traffic and, in May 1953, the UK state airline British European Airways inaugurated twice-weekly scheduled services from London, using twenty-seven-seat Vickers Vikings flying out of the RAF base at Northolt while Heathrow was under reconstruction. A refuelling stop at Bordeaux was necessary, and the fare was £39 3s0d return.
Elsewhere in Spain, today's major resorts were yet to be discovered by foreigners. In 1950 Benidorm was a small coastal fishing village with a grand total of 102 hotel rooms. The newly appointed mayor, Pedro Zaragoza Orts, had noted the growth of tourism in northern Europe. Recognising the tourist potential of his location, he set about developing the facilities. He arranged for running water to be piped to the village from 10 miles away, and then contacted all the major European scheduled airlines. As a result, tourists began to arrive in increasing numbers.
One problem that arose concerned beachwear. The bikini was banned in staunchly Catholic Spain, but from 1953 Mayor Zaragoza permitted it to be worn on the beaches of Benidorm. The backlash was immediate and drastic. The Civil Guard escorted bikini wearers off the beaches, and the mayor was threatened with excommunication from the Catholic Church. Undaunted, he travelled by motor scooter all the way to Madrid to see the ruler, General Franco, and was accorded his backing.
Tourist travel to Spain was still in its infancy in the early 1950s, and British citizens still had to obtain an expensive visa to enter the country. A 1952 newspaper survey revealed that only half of the UK population took any kind of holiday, and of these only 3 per cent travelled abroad.
In 1954 the runway at Palma's Son Bonet Airport was extended and a parallel taxiway and parking apron were added to cope with the growing number of tourists arriving by air. However, by 1956, landing on the 4,920ft-long (1,500m) runway was still a job for expert pilots as the approach was made through mountains, and a stone wall and some orange trees rendered the first 650ft (200m) of it unusable.
From 1 January 1954 the Sir Henry Lunn travel agency chain had been offering credit facilities in connection with its continental holiday programme, but between 1955 and 1960 the increase in UK average weekly earnings (including overtime) far outstripped the rise in retail prices. There was now the possibility of developing winter holiday programmes to areas such as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and of offering affordable holidays to Madeira and the Canary Islands, which until then had only been the playgrounds of the wealthy.
During the summer of 1957, British European Airways (BEA) obtained about 14 per cent of its revenue from the 'inclusive tour fares' available to travel agents using its scheduled service flights to create holiday packages. In the financial year 1955–56 the independent airlines had earned some £365,000 from the operation of inclusive tour charter flights, but this was a small proportion of their total revenues of around £17 million. By far their biggest money earner (£6.725 million) was the operation of trooping flights to British Army bases in the Middle East and Singapore. This was about to change, however, as the overseas military presence was run down and holiday charters expanded, and not only from UK airports.
Since the end of the Second World War there had been a ban on German airlines operating services out of West Berlin. All scheduled and charter services were reserved for aircraft of the 'occupying powers' (the USA, Great Britain and France), and the UK independent airlines secured lucrative contracts from major German tour operators for charter flights to the Mediterranean resorts. This work was to expand and continue well into the era of wide-bodied jets.
Majorca's original airport at Son Bonet was no longer able to cope with the increased volume of traffic and was unable to be extended, so in 1958 Spain's National Airport Plan proposed the construction of a new large commercial airport at Son Sant Joan to serve the island. This was opened on 7 July 1960, and during that year around 150,000 passengers were carried into and out of Palma by UK scheduled and charter airlines.
The growth of the charter airlines attracted scrutiny from shipping lines anxious to diversify into air transport now that their traditional market was being eroded by scheduled air travel. Many of them acquired substantial financial interests in the independent carriers during the 1950s and early 1960s. During 1960, 2.25 million Britons holidayed abroad and in the summer of 1961 UK holidaymakers comprised the majority of visitors to Majorca, but even so most of the population still stayed loyal to resorts such as Blackpool instead of venturing abroad.
The year 1961 was a black one for the charter airlines, with the demise of Overseas Aviation, Air Safaris, Falcon Airways and Pegasus Airlines, all based at Gatwick and nearly all undercapitalised and thus ill-equipped to deal with the slump in traffic during the winter months. By the summer of 1962 the remaining companies were also having to compete with foreign charter airlines such as Italy's SAM and the Spanish carrier Aviaco, both of which were the charter subsidiaries of their countries' state airlines.
In the mid-1960s travelling abroad by air was still something of a novelty to a lot of people in Britain, and, unlike today, many holidaymakers wore their Sunday best for the flights. From 1963 the Biggin Hill Air Fair was held at the famous Battle of Britain airfield in Kent each May, and a variety of charter airlines made aircraft such as the Douglas DC-6B, Caravelle and BAC One-Eleven available there for the public to queue up to inspect inside and out. There were even short pleasure flights in such typical holiday charter airliners, all geared to overcoming any doubts about holidaying overseas by air.
One of the most popular revenue earners for the tour operators and independent airlines at this time was the operation of day trips by air to the Dutch tulip fields from airports around the UK. Most of these were organised by the newly established Clarksons Tours, whose meteoric growth and dramatic collapse would later shake the travel industry. In April 1966 a day trip from Bristol to the tulip fields cost £9, and included flights to Rotterdam and back in a Dakota aircraft of Dan-Air Services and coach travel from there to Keukenhof, with brief stops at Delft and The Hague.
By 1969 the renamed Clarksons Holidays Ltd had become Europe's largest low-cost inclusive tour operator, and had sparked off a price war by offering fourteen nights' full-board accommodation in Majorca and flights from the UK for £50, and taking an allocation of some 6,000 of the 10,000 or so hotel beds available in Benidorm.
It was around this time that Clarksons, in conjunction with local agent Gold Case Travel, and the Newcastle Evening Gazette, organised a 'Holiday Spectacular' on a mid-January evening at Teesside Airport. They expected around 2,000 people to attend, but in the event over 15,000 queued patiently to look around the interiors of a Dan-Air Comet 4 and BAC One-Eleven on the tarmac.
The public's appetite for overseas travel was no longer confined to Europe and the Mediterranean. At the end of 1965 the first ever programme of charter packages to the USA was unveiled, featuring flights by Caledonian Airways. By 1971, however, the UK was heading into a recession which was exacerbated by high unemployment and industrial action. This included a postal strike which played havoc with the processing of travel documents and payments.
Britain's support of Israel during the Arab–Israeli War of 1973 led to an Arab embargo on oil from the Arab states that slashed the UK's supplies by 40 per cent. Fuel prices soared, and tour operators were forced to impose fuel surcharges on the published price of holidays. Industrial action by miners caused the declaration of a State of Emergency on 13 November 1973, under which a three-day working week was imposed in order to preserve coal stocks used to generate electricity.
In 1974 airlines using UK airports were restricted to an allocated amount of fuel each month. When the Italian charter airline SAM used up its entire January allocation in three weeks its request for additional supplies was refused. In retaliation the Italian Government banned charter flights to Italy by British carriers. One of the first to feel the effect of this was Dan-Air at Gatwick, where around 100 passengers waiting to board were told that their flight had been cancelled.
As a result of all this chaos, bookings for overseas holidays slumped by 30–40 per cent, and many tour operators and charter airlines went out of business. Further problems were faced by passengers on holiday charter flights in the mid-1970s, as a series of industrial disputes involving Spanish air traffic control staff led to closures of Spanish airspace for up to seventy-two hours at a time, and in 1974 Clarksons Holidays and its airline, Court Line Aviation, suddenly ceased operations. Some sources later estimated that in the five years leading up to the collapse some 8 million holidays had been on offer at an average of £1 below cost price.
By 1975 many UK residents had acquired timeshare apartment accommodation in Mediterranean resorts and so they did not need to buy holiday packages that included a hotel stay. However, the regulations required the inclusion of accommodation in tour prices. To get around this rule, the tour operator Cosmos introduced 'cheapies' holidays to Greece for £59, the price including charter flights and a throwaway voucher for very basic hostel-type accommodation, often in shared rooms without hot and cold running water. In the years to come 'seat-only' sales would become big business for the tour operators, and by 1988 around 20 per cent of charter flight passengers would be travelling on this basis.
In the late 1980s another price war erupted as the major tour operators hired more and more aircraft and flooded the market with holidays. In the ensuing battle for market share, price discounting became the norm. During 1987 and 1988 four new charter airlines began serving the inclusive tour market, despite there already being more than a dozen established carriers. In 1989 the top thirty British tour operators made a collective loss, leading to cutbacks in their flight programmes.
From 1990, however, the situation improved, and by 1993 the overall inclusive tour market had increased by 10 per cent, with over 13 million passengers being carried that year. In an effort to improve their year-round utilisation and tap into new markets, many of the independent airlines diversified into scheduled service operations, but this proved a costly exercise and the collapse of major carriers such as Dan-Air Services and Air Europe caused the others to rethink and curbed any further expansion in this direction.
By the summer of 1994 UK charter airlines were carrying 40 per cent of the EU total, with the most popular route still being London–Palma. For the summer of 1998 a dozen or so UK airlines were operating more than 150 aircraft, representing some 36,000 seats. The daily utilisation of each aircraft averaged over twelve flying hours, and this productivity, coupled with some of the lowest employee costs in Europe, made British charter airlines the envy of their continental European rivals.
By 1998 the continued growth in scheduled services by British Airways and its franchisees made it virtually impossible for the holiday charter airlines to obtain additional landing slots at the major UK airports at sociable hours. The only way they could carry more passengers was to introduce larger aircraft onto existing services. The following years were to see the introduction of types such as the Airbus A300 and the Boeing 757, which could not only carry more passengers to the main Mediterranean resorts but could also be used on long-haul routes to North America and the Far East.
During the year 2000 the largest UK charter airlines, in terms of passengers/kilometres flown were: Britannia Airways (21,747 million), Airtours International (18,750 million), Air 2000 (17,950 million), JMC Airlines (14,300 million) and Monarch Airways (13,650 million). All of these carriers were subsidiaries of, or had alliances with, major tour operators.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Flying to the Sun by Charles Woodley. Copyright © 2016 Charles Woodley. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
1 Britain's Holiday Airline Industry: A Historical Overview,
2 The Relevant Legislation,
3 UK Holiday Charter Airports,
4 Pioneering Days,
5 The Struggle to Become Established,
6 Into the Jet Age,
7 Vertical Integration,
8 'Seat-only' Operations,
9 The Long-haul Market,
10 Transatlantic Services,
11 Niche Operators,
12 The Situation Today,
13 The Low-cost Airlines,
Appendix 1 Major Aircraft Types Operated by Britain's Holiday Airlines,
Appendix 2 Principal Charter Flight Operators to Palma in 1960,
Appendix 3 UK Charter Airline Names to Disappear During 1989–98,
Appendix 4 Tour Operator/Charter Airline Alliances,
Appendix 5 UK Charter Airlines Fleets and Total Seat Capacity by Type,
Sources,
Colour Plates,
Copyright,