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British Caledonian in 1979
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1979 was another good year for British Caledonian. The airline took delivery of its delayed third and fourth McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 widebodied aircraft during the first and third quarter of that year. This permitted the aircraft's introduction on its daily Gatwick-Houston schedule as well as the replacement of the remaining 707-operated services on its mid- and South Atlantic routes. The narrowbodied capacity thus released was used to add frequencies on existing routes as well as to launch services to new medium- and long-haul destinations. As a result, BCal launched a fourth weekly service to Brazil. It also launched a new route to Oran and added Quito and Guayaquil to the mid-Atlantic schedule. The company furthermore increased frequencies on its short-haul routes. A fourth daily round-trip was added to both Gatwick-Manchester and Gatwick-Brussels. A third daily frequency operating on week days (Monday to Friday) was added to the Newcastle-Amsterdam portion of BCal's Glasgow-Newcastle-Amsterdam regional route. Furthermore, BCal granted BIA permission to prefix the flight numbers allocated to all flights that airline operated between Gatwick and Le Touquet as well as between Gatwick and Rotterdam under contract to BCal with its own UK airline designator in addition to BCal's BR airline designator, with frequencies being increased on both of these routes as well.
During that year BCal also established a wholly owned helicopter subsidiary and it placed the launch order for a brand-new widebodied aircraft, the Airbus A310.
This was also the time BCal came up with its own proposal to create a new network of European low-fare services. These were to be marketed under the trademark "Miniprix" and were meant to counter Laker's plans for a pan-European "Skytrain" operation that was supposed to operate on up to 660 different routes criss-crossing the entire continent. Including BCal's existing four European destinations, it envisaged linking Gatwick with up to 25 points on the Continent.
As far as the former was concerned, the new air services agreement the UK had negotiated with Denmark, Norway and Sweden during December 1978 contained an important clause that effectively restricted the provision of scheduled services on trunk routes from/to London to BA and SAS, thereby continuing to prevent BCal from using the licences the CAA had awarded it the year before. (As a concession to the UK Government's desire to develop Gatwick as an alternative international gateway airport serving London, SAS agreed to transfer its twice-daily London-Stavanger service and one of its daily London-Copenhagen services from Heathrow to Gatwick as well as to launch a brand-new, daily Gatwick-Aarhus route at the start of the 1979 summer timetable period. BA agreed to launch a daily Gatwick-Stockholm service at the same time. BCal's senior management described the then new Anglo-Scandinavian air agreement as a real "can of worms".)
Regarding the latter, the grounding of the worldwide DC-10 fleet in the aftermath of American's May 1979 Chicago crash necessitated the short-term lease of another 747 to enable BCal to provide adequate capacity on its Nigerian trunk routes during that period. BCal also operated a Dan-Air Comet on short-term lease between Gatwick and Tripoli while the 707s normally used on that service were redeployed to operate a reduced schedule to Houston and South America during the aforesaid period.
Another setback BCal suffered at the time was the CAA's decision to turn down the airline's application to extend its existing Gatwick-Lusaka service to Harare (then still called Salisbury) from the start of the 1980 summer timetable period and instead to approve BA's rival application to begin serving the Zimbabwean capital from Heathrow via Johannesburg.
Launching a new widebodied aircraft
In 1979 BCal became the European launch customer for the Airbus A310 when the airline placed a firm order for three A310-200s plus an option on another three aircraft.
Airbus Industrie had offered BCal a generous discount as an independent launch customer who ran its business along commercial lines and was not depending on any government's financial backing. It thought that this would significantly enhance the new widebody's sales prospects in the US, the largest and most important market in the world for large, commercial aircraft.
Two of the aircraft BCal had on firm order were to be delivered during the spring of 1984 while the remaining aircraft was to be delivered during the autumn of that year. During the summer period BCal's A310s occasionally operated peak-time services on the Gatwick-Charles de Gaulle route on week days and on Gatwick-Jersey on week-ends as well.
However, both aircraft only had a short career with BCal. They were sold during the mid-1980s following the loss of the highly profitable Libyan routes. (At the time BCal's senior management decided that these aircraft no longer suited its requirements and chose to standardise the airline's widebodied fleet on the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and the Boeing 747, respectively. )
Following the aircraft's sale to a company based in Hong Kong, BCal became the subject of a major controversy involving both the UK and the US governments when Western intelligence sources discovered both aircraft in Libya - minus their engines. In spite of the imposition of international sanctions denying Libya access to anything high tech - including commercial airliners, their powerplants and systems - at that time, these aircraft had somehow managed to reach there via Cyprus.
A helicopter subsidiary
In 1979 BCal established British Caledonian Helicopters as a wholly owned subsidiary headquartered in Aberdeen as a result of purchasing Ferranti Helicopters.
BCal's decision to set up its own helicopter subsidiary at Aberdeen, the leading North Sea oil industry centre, at a time when North Sea oil production was in full swing was driven by the airline's desire to cash in on the North Sea oil boom. It was also part of a strategy to offer a seamless service to the oil industry as an extension of BCal's contemporary "linking the oil capitals of the world" corporate strategy. BCal felt vindicated in its decision to launch a helicopter subsidiary when the price of a barrel of crude oil had reached an all-time high in the aftermath of the second global oil price shock of the 20th century triggered by the Shah of Iran's fall from power in 1979.
However, the airline decided to sell off its helicopter unit in 1987 as a result of its growing financial difficulties as well as the steep decline in oil-related business due to the collapse of the oil price in the mid-'80s.
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