As Nicholas Parsons and Anglia TV’s ‘Sale of the Century’ bestrode the ITV schedules, so the region’s own airline was helping boost the profile of East Anglia still further
AIR ANGLIA
In its first year, passenger numbers tripled. In the second and third they doubled. By the end of the fourth, traffic had risen by half as much again.
For the early 1970s, when most other carriers were struggling with a quadruple increase in oil prices, that wasn’t bad. For an outfit run by two men who’d spent the previous 20 years operating seaside pleasure flights and air taxi services it was amazing.
Sure, Air Anglia was in the right place at the right time for the opportunities emerging with the nascent North Sea oil and gas industry. But it took vision to see how to exploit them.
The two founders of Air Anglia were certainly men of vision. “They both believed that North Sea oil was going to last longer than the five years that had been predicted in the early years”, Phil Chapman tells Aeroplane.
But the Norwich-based carrier’s former commercial director also maintains that Air Anglia wouldn’t have got off the ground if the bigger airlines had pre-empted it by starting competing scheduled operations to Aberdeen. “They c…
