British Caledonian in 1978

British Caledonian termed 1978 the "Gatwick Year". There were several reasons for this.

By 1978 the airline had fully recovered from the 1974 crisis year, which had threatened its very existence at that time. After the severe contraction forced upon it by the early '70s' oil crisis, the company's core scheduled operation was growing again with new widebodied aircraft and routes being added and schedules being expanded. Furthermore, business was booming with planes being fuller than at any time in the firm's history and it expected to earn record profits during that year.

To underline BCal's confidence about its future prospects, the interiors of the airline's narrowbodied fleet were undergoing a major refurbishment at that time. (These aircraft - including the entire 16-strong, short-haul BAC One-Eleven fleet comprising nine larger series 500s and seven smaller series 200s - were given "widebody look" interiors featuring new seat covers that prominently displayed BCal's corporate logo among several other improvements to give customers the same travel experience as on the newly delivered DC-10s.)

During the second half of 1978 BCal also introduced an updated livery and replaced its single Piper PA-23 Aztec acquired in 1975 with a pair of larger Piper PA-31 Navajo Chieftains. (BCal used one of these aircraft to inaugurate a new Gatwick-Birmingham feeder route at the start of the 1978/'79 winter timetable period.)

These positive developments happened to coincide with the late Sir Adam's chairmanship of the AEA (1977 to 1978).

BCal also became a "scheduled service only" airline during 1978 , implementing a decision taken the year before when the share of passengers travelling on charter flights had declined to just 15% of all passengers carried (as opposed to two-thirds at the time of the airline's inception seven years earlier). There were two main reason's for BCal's withdrawal from the charter market:
* A 25% contraction of the transatlantic ABC flights market as a result of the initial success of the daily Laker Airways "Skytrain" low-fares, "no frills" scheduled operation between London Gatwick and New York JFK, which began during the previous year's autumn season.

* A steady decline in charter rates in the European package tour holiday market where BCal used to supply whole-plane charter seats to its Blue Sky Holidays tour operator affiliate as well as third party tour companies.

Prior to "Skytrain", BCal had been a major operator in the ABC market running regular flights to the US, Canada and West Africa from its Gatwick base and a number of other UK departure points. These flights were sold through its Golden Lion Tours tour operator affiliate. BCal found that it could deploy this long-haul capacity far more profitably to increase the number of routes and flights in its most important long-haul scheduled markets because the yields on its prime long-haul scheduled routes were much higher than in the ABC market.

Although operating short-/medium-haul whole-plane charters enabled the airline to improve the utilisation of its BAC One-Eleven fleet - especially at week-ends, the company's increasing focus on the scheduled side of its business (as opposed to charter flights) meant that overall costs were increasing as well. The reason for this increase in costs was the greater number of overheads that were required to support the expanding scheduled operation. This, in turn, meant that the firm had acquired significantly higher costs than most of its contemporary charter airline rivals, thereby making it more and more difficult to compete profitably in this market at the prevailing low rates. In addition, there always used to be problems with the aircraft's configuration. (BCal used to operate its short-/medium-haul schedules and charters with the same planes as its whole-plane charter market activities were not of the scale that would have justified keeping a dedicated fleet for these activities. This, of course, meant that the airline was unable to adopt separate high- and low-density seating arrangements to meet the differing, specific requirements of the scheduled and charter markets.)

1978 was the first year BCal operated the majority of its scheduled services plying the prime long-haul routes to West Africa and South America with state-of-the-art widebody equipment.

At the start of that year's summer timetable period flight frequencies on BCal's Gatwick-Glasgow and Gatwick-Amsterdam routes increased to five round-trips per day on week days (Monday to Friday). During that period the airline also resumed its Edinburgh-Newcastle-Copenhagen service, which it had abandoned in 1974.

During 1978 Abidjan joined BCal's scheduled route network. At the start of the 1978/'79 winter timetable period Benghazi and Birmingham joined the network. At that time the airline also increased frequencies between London Gatwick and Paris Charles de Gaulle to seven daily round-trips on week days, with flights operating at two-hourly intervals. The addition of twice-weekly flights to the Libyan port city of Benghazi to the existing five weekly services to Tripoli meant that for the first time BCal was able to offer its passengers daily flights to Libya, an important market for highly profitable, oil-related business travel. BCal's introduction of a 747 on the daily Gatwick-Houston schedule furthermore enabled it to replace its two-class configured One-Eleven 500s on the West African coastal schedule to Banjul and Freetown via Casablanca and Las Palmas with 707s. The 707's greater range (compared with the One-Eleven) enabled it to cut out the intermediate stops and offer its passengers a more convenient, direct routing that took less time. BCal moreover replaced two-class One-Elevens operating on the Tripoli route with 707s.

In addition, the BAA had just completed the first phase of a major refurbishment and extension of BCal's Gatwick base. The centrepiece of this revamp was a completely refurbished centre pier featuring eleven telescopic, widebody-compatible loading bridges. These were the first loading bridges to be installed at Gatwick, which was a single-terminal airport at the time. For the first time in its history, BCal also gained a dedicated check-in area for all its flights. This allowed its passengers to avoid the so-called "bucket-and-spade" brigade (as the airport's charter airline passengers were commonly referred to during the 1970s and early '80s). as well as to add Aberdeen to its existing Edinburgh-Newcastle-Copenhagen licence. BCal was keen to expand its limited short-haul European network beyond the existing four routes linking London Gatwick with Paris Charles de Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol, Brussels National (Zaventem) and Genoa (a former BUA route). The airline needed to develop its connecting traffic at Gatwick by growing the European network to include destinations in Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Southern Europe in order to help it increase load factors on its long-haul flights to Africa, South America and the US as well as to improve the profitability of these services.

BA had applied to serve Dublin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and Zürich from Gatwick. (the airline had changed the end of its financial year from September 30 to October 31 in the meantime). This translated into a £10m retained profit. It was the company's best-ever financial result since its formation back in November 1970. It also was a clear sign that it had left the dark days of late 1974 and early 1975 when its very existence was under threat firmly behind.

BCal's senior management decided to allocate £644,000 of the retained profit to a new profit-share scheme

This service was operating ten times a day in each direction using a 28-seater Sikorsky S-61N helicopter, which was owned by the BAA. BCal held the licence to operate the service and provided the cabin crew. (A single crew member used to look after the passengers on this ten-minute flight.) British Airways Helicopters, the wholly owned helicopter subsidiary of BA whose headquarters were located at Gatwick, provided the flight deck crew and engineering support.

The service ended in 1986 when its licence was withdrawn on environmental grounds following the completion of the M25 London orbital motorway. (There were growing complaints about the "excessive" noise created by a low-flying helicopter from people living underneath the Gatwick-Heathrow Airlink's flight path in politically sensitive constituencies.)

The most obvious choice for a supersonic service was Gatwick-Lagos, the backbone and main money spinner of BCal's scheduled operation. BCal's Concorde task force's brief was to assess the viability of a second daily all-premium supersonic service complementing the airline's existing daily subsonic, mixed-class widebody service on this route.

BCal put in a bid to acquire one of these "white tail" aircraft. (BA, which had jointly introduced the world's first commercial supersonic service with Air France in 1976, was bidding for the aircraft as well.) In the event, BCal's bid was not successful.

Following the unsuccessful bid to acquire Concorde direct from the manufacturer, BCal eventually arranged for two aircraft to be leased from BA and to have them maintained by Air France. It became necessary to find additional work for BCal's envisaged two-strong, leased Concorde fleet to increase the aircraft's utilisation, thus permitting a profitable operation. Therefore, BCal decided to use the second aircraft to launch a supersonic service between Gatwick and Atlanta. The reason BCal chose to operate its first supersonic service to the US to Atlanta rather than Houston, a far more profitable destination due to the oil-related traffic, was Concorde's range limitation. (BCal's Concorde task force had come to the conclusion that only non-stop supersonic services were viable.)

Both supersonic services were to be launched at the start of the 1979 summer timetable period.

However, the changing geopolitical situation - especially, the fall of the Shah of Iran and the subsequent tripling of crude oil prices - as well as the sheer complexity of the operational arrangements eventually put paid to BCal's Concorde plans.

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