Letter from Fuerteventura
It’s schools half-term holiday week in the UK, so hello all from the, possibly lesser known in the USA, Canary Island of Fuerteventura, where Family WHBM arrived on Saturday courtesy of a Jet2 737-800.
What relevance this has to the Old Airliners thread will become apparent in due course, but this was a trip on an almost new aircraft, on about the one holiday airline from the UK that seems to doing well and expanding. Fuerteventura airport didn’t even exist at the time we commonly discuss, it was built in the 1970s, before which the quite large island was a complete outpost of nothingness, just volcanic rock and sand, and the accommodation didn’t start to get built until well into the 1980s. I last came through here for a week 25 years ago, on an Air 2000 757 from Gatwick, and from what was then a pretty deserted place there’s been quite a build up at a few points, though it’s still mainly rock and sand. Tahiti it ain’t ! It’s only 60 miles across the sea to Saharan Africa, which is the same, though the island, like all The Canaries, is wholly Spanish, both today and in its background.
In 1963 it was one DC-3 a day from Las Palmas, landing on a gravel strip elsewhere, and has worked up through F-27s to ATRs today, quite a high frequency now, with several operators. But most of the use is holiday flights from Europe. Even those have changed, as we taxied in the first two aircraft noted were Easyjet and Ryanair. Although the UK and Germany might seem the principal sources, in fact the largest number of flights is from mainland Spain, from where the big operator to here is – Ryanair. It’s a whole new world.
In contrast, I don’t think there’s ever been a service here from the USA; the most practical route would seem to be by Iberia, connecting at Madrid onto their twice-daily A319 to the island.
Now I did say at the start that there was an Old Airliners link, and it came surprisingly at check-in at Stansted. Jet2 do their own handling which is extraordinarily efficient compared to the typical low cost/charter outsourced approach, so despite yards of Tensa barriers laid out it was straight up to the counter, where we got a notably senior gentleman, who worked through every step efficiently and effortlessly. At the end this occurred :
“There we are, through to departures. Have you been to Stansted before ?”
“Well yes. In fact I was through here the first week the new terminal here opened. 1990 was it ?”
“Hmm, do you remember which airline ?”
“Air UK. BAe146 to Edinburgh”.
“Really. I was here then. In fact I used to work at the old terminal, if you knew it, Transmeridian Air Cargo”.
“Ah, Mike Keegan’s lot”.
“Well … yes ! ”.
Now Keegan was involved with a whole string of 1950s-60s-70s airlines from this area, Transmeridian, BAF, and BKS – he was the K in those initials.
As Mrs WHBM 
said “what a shame he wasn’t coming off shift and you could go for a drink”.