3. (1987) Passengers flying between Cork, Ireland and London, England have a choice of three BAC-111 operators, each operating the little British twinjet into a different London area airport (LHR, LGW or LTN). Can you identify each of the three airlines and match it up with the corresponding airport?
Here's my hunch. Heathrow would be served on one of Aer Lingus' stalwart One-Eleven 200s, more than 20 years with the airline and still going strong. They used to run from Dublin to mainland Europe, but by this time had come down to the lesser schedules.
Gatwick I think would be Dan-Air, picking up whatever odd routes they could. They had all sorts of miscellania from Gatwick, and this might be one of them.
Luton I am thinking would be an early incarnation of Ryanair, who didn't have their own jets at the time but hired them in. A number were from Tarom of Romania, operated by Romanian pilots but with Irish cabin crew. They also had a (in fact the only) One-Eleven from London European, an odd operator who came and went quite quickly. But these would be badged as Ryanair.
29. (1987) You’ll be flying from Dubai to London next month to commence studies at the University of Greenwich at Kent.
Alas, I must report that the U of Greenwich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Greenwich did not exist until 1992, and furthermore is not in Kent, but in Inner London. How do I know this ? Written as one of its former alumni (1989-92) where I got my MBA. Indeed we started when it was Thames Polytechnic, but ended up rebadged as a university. Their business school was then in Wapping, near Tower Bridge, an old converted dockside industrial building. It's been converted again now, and is a block of expensive apartments. Meanwhile, if you ever visit Greenwich the splendid old Naval college alongside the Cutty Sark is now their main centre, probably the most architecturally spectacular campus in Britain.
The course was part time, evenings, and most of us either worked in the City of London or lived nearby. I recall one guy who visited Paris frequently. This was in the early days of also nearby London City airport, when Paris was served with DHC-7s by two airlines, Brymon (aligned with BA) and Eurocity Express (part of British Midland). Classes started at 6.30pm, he had been in Paris for the day, and at apparently considerable extra expense to his employers was booked back on a 5pm flight into LCY, instead of to Heathrow. He went out to CDG that evening, to find his flight was … cancelled. He was rebooked on the other carrier, but they went from a different CDG terminal, he spent more than an hour just getting between them, and walked in to class more than halfway through the evening. Needless to say his account of it all absorbed all the time in the pub afterwards.
Meanwhile, back at the question, I'll go along with the Emirates A310 as well. It must have been in this year, 1987, that I visited a business customer south of London, an Australian expat who I met up with in the car park, just as the A310 from this upstart new airline passed low overhead running in to Gatwick. I described the new airline and he told how his Australian brother had a job as a dentist in Dubai where he was "going to make a fortune". Don't know if he did, but the airline certainly achieved it. I think London was their first mainstream route. At this time Dubai's principal airline was Gulf Air, which ran quite a substantial operation from the various points into London with Tristars, but had a habit of linking two or even three points before setting off for Europe, which hacked the various rulers of the UAE who were all minority shareholders in the airline at the time, and who felt they deserved better than routing Dubai-Doha-Bahrain-London. Gulf Air didn't react sufficiently, and the rest is history. Gulf were a notably British carrier, and long had been, their fleet was even registered in Britain, including their first Tristars, until the end of the 1970s, and all the management and pilots were British expats.