Advance Booking Charter

Advance Booking Charter flights were first introduced in the early 1970s to meet the largely unsatisfied demand for affordable long-haul flights to popular destinations, especially on both sides of the North Atlantic ocean.

The world's first ABC flight was operated on April 2, 1973, by Laker Airways between Manchester and Toronto carrying 250 passengers on one of the airline's newly acquired McDonnell Douglas DC-10 widebodied jet aircraft.

The introduction of ABC flights was an attempt by the airline industry and the aviation authorities in Europe and North America - first and foremost in United Kingdom and the United States as well as Canada - to replace the complicated and unworkable "affinity group" charter rules with a more rational set of rules that was easier to implement as well as less open to potential abuse.

In the late 1960s an obscure rule crafted by IATA concerning the permissibility of chartering aircraft to operate flights across the North Atlantic for the sole purpose of carrying so-called "affinity groups" at fares below IATA's officially agreed minimum fare for any given route by the organisation's member airlines through their wholly owned, non-IATA subsidiaries (such as BEA Airtours or BOAC Charters for instance), came to the attention of a determined group of mainly non-IATA airlines, which sought to exploit these legal loopholes for themselves. This group of airlines included many leading independent British airlines of yesteryear, such as Britannia Airways, British United Airways, Caledonian Airways, Dan-Air and Laker Airways. (Some of these wholly privately owned, independent airlines - notably British United Airways - were actually IATA members themselves. However, at the time IATA was dominated by majority or wholly state-owned "flag carriers", which used that organisation to frame rules that were designed to protect them from what they considered "excessive" and "unwarranted" competition by independent airlines.)

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