Tag Archives: Gatwick

The Earliest A320s

A launch customer for the A320 was British Caledonian Airways. Unfortunately for those that liked Scottish themed airlines, BCal was bought by British Airways before the jets were delivered. I recall some dispute with Airbus about who would pay for the repaint of the first jet but maybe that is an urban legend. I think there were ten of them and BA took delivery. However, they were an orphan fleet for a long time in amongst all of the BA 737s and 757s.

That changed when BA went to an all A320 family short haul fleet breaking their long standing use of Boeing jets (plus some other stragglers). However, that cam much later. The earliest jets were A320-100s and these didn’t have the wing tip fences. The A320-200 followed very soon afterwards. Here are two shots of them. One is from 1988 with an A320 in BA’s Landor scheme on approach over my head to Gatwick. The other shot is a late in life shot of one of the earliest jets taken at Heathrow. These early examples are all gone now.

80s Airliners

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In previous posts I have talked about the program I am going through the scan all of my old negatives and transparencies. It is a far speedier process than I used to use but it is still pretty time consuming and I am about a third of the way through the collection. It will depend on how many rainy weekend days I get as to how quickly I go through them. Something I am discovering as I go is that I have a variety of shots I had completely forgotten about. Over the years I have gone through the sheets of negatives from various aviation events that I wanted shots from. I was pretty familiar with what was there. What I hadn’t realized was that my old film days would often include two or three shots of an aviation topic in amongst a bunch of other shots.

I have been coming across all sorts of shots, both civil and military that I had forgotten about. The majority of them are airliners, some of which are types now out of service and occasionally airlines that don’t exist anymore. Old 747-100s, some early Airbuses, 727 and 737-200, the occasional Ilyushin and even a Shorts Belfast show up. Needless to say there are some appearances by Concorde too.

A combination of poor technique, less than ideal conditions and some less than pristine negatives means that these shots are not going to be gracing the walls any time soon. However, they are an interesting reminder of things that have gone. I wish I had more comprehensive coverage of the time but I actually didn’t take that many pictures at that time. A tad disappointing but I can’t change it now.

The Early Emirates

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If you were to ask someone to name one of the dominant global airlines these days, it wouldn’t be long before the name Emirates came up. The rapid growth and large fleet of wide-bodies makes Emirate a familiar sight around the world. It is easy to forget that is was not always thus. I first saw Emirates in 1988. At the time, I had a small book of airliners around the world and it listed the planes that were potentially going to be seen in the UK. It didn’t include short haul jets from the opposite side of the world but it did have something that could conceivably be seen. At the time, Emirates were listed as having one A300 and two A310s. A far cry from what they have now.

They used to fly in to Gatwick with the A310s. While working for the CAA, I got to spend a bunch of time under the approach to Gatwick recording noise levels of the passing jets. I did manage to get the occasional shot too! Here is a scan of a slightly rough negative of an Emirates A310 passing the middle marker. This plane would now be considered a bit too small for their regular operations!