WHBM

BA had three distinctly-configured L-1011 Tristar fleets. Most established were the "European" configuration, a small Club (possibly even F initially) cabin at the front, and a large Y main cabin. Then there was the Intercontinental configuration, 3-class once Club came along, mainstream galleys etc, different seating and legroom, and notably less seats. Finally there was the Airtours holiday flight single class fleet at Gatwick.

Although delivered in these layouts, there were reconfigurations and transfers from time to time between the fleets, the European fleet was reduced somewhat and the surplus, reconfigured, moved to the Middle East/Gulf operations that were still within their range. The longer-range -200s were initially for Intercontinental, but one or more got rigged up as Airtours holiday fleet in years when they needed ones with the range. There were substitutions between them; Tel Aviv for example was rather floating between the two Heathrow fleets, while the Gatwick Airtours fleet in winter often came over to Heathrow and got put on schedules.

Within Europe there were quite a lot of odd Tristar runs, as here to Barcelona, mixed in with normal Tridents. Most surprising was a couple of weekday trips on Heathrow to Belfast, which replaced four morning Trident round trips, and caused a lot of complaints from the Northern Ireland business community about the reduction in flight time spread and the congestion in Belfast terminal when one turned up. Still, BA had pretty much the monopoly then, so it was that or nothing. It was also quite often the reverse, a Tristar sent elsewhere on the day and replaced by two Tridents running 10 minutes apart, all these causing considerable dislocation to the ground staff.

The classic route for the Tristars was London to Paris, where they held down pretty much a two-hourly operation from when they came until replaced by 767-300s, which had exactly the same fleet configuration split between European and Intercontinental. Who said separate BEA and BOAC were dead ?