British Airtours
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| Founded | 1969 (as BEA Airtours) | ||||||
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| Ceased operations | 1988 (renamed Caledonian Airways) | ||||||
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| Fleet size | 10 | ||||||
| Destinations | worldwide | ||||||
| Headquarters | Gatwick Airport (administrative HQ, 1970—1988) Ruislip, London Borough of Hillingdon (corporate HQ, 1969—1973) London Heathrow Airport (corporate HQ, 1974—1988) Lowfield Heath, Crawley, West Sussex (combined HQ, 1988—1999) |
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| Key people | P.C.F. Lawton, Eamonn Mullaney, Capt. W. Baillie, George Blundell-Pound, E.L. Killip, J.R. Wood, Capt. P.J. McKeown, R.A. Thorburn, W.A. Thompson, J. Marshall |
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British Airtours was a British charter airline with flight operations out of London Gatwick and Manchester Airport.
Originally established as BEA Airtours in 1969, it became a wholly owned subsidiary of then state-owned British Airways (BA) following the British European Airways (BEA) — British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) merger of the early 1970s. British Airtours adopted the Caledonian Airways name when the newly privatised British Airways completed the acquisition of the rival British Caledonian (BCal) in April 1988. Caledonian Airways was eventually sold to UK tour operator Inspirations in 1995, marking BA's exit from the mainstream inclusive tour (IT) market. In 1999, Thomas Cook acquired Inspirations and merged Caledonian Airways with Flying Colours to form JMC Air Services, a forerunner of the UK arm of the present day Thomas Cook Airlines.
BEA Airtours was formed on 24 April 1969 as a division of BEA to provide it with a low cost platform to participate in the then rapidly growing inclusive tour (IT) holiday flights market, which until then had been the exclusive domain of wholly privately owned airlines independent from the government-owned corporation BEA and BOAC. BEA saw this as a necessary counterweight to the independents' rapidly growing scheduled activities that began encroaching on what BEA and BOAC had traditionally regarded as their sole preserve. BEA Airtours' formation was in line with one of the recommendations of the Edwards Report on the future of British air industry - that the corporations should enter the inclusive tour and charter market.
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