Canadian Pacific

Happy New Year everyone. 
The January blues are  reality for many of us and I know a lot of people like to think of getting away during  these times so I thought I would take a look at a couple of airline issued postcards this week.
Aeronautica and postcards do seem to go hand in hand, perhaps because they are both associated with holidays. I do know people who have amassed large collections solely of plane related cards. I'm not one of those but I do quite like airline related cards.
You don't tend to see airline issued postcards anymore. I don't know if it is a security issue or if postcards just are n't  considered a good method of advertising anymore. While modern ones don't seem to exist, vintage ones are not hard to find. 
Today's card is an advert for Canadian Pacific airlines. While searching for further information about them I did notice that items relating to them seem  very collectable. Canadian Pacific airlines were founded in 1942 and operated flights all over the world, pioneering the polar route to the Far East. They were renamed CP Airlines in 1968 until 1986 then reverted back to their original  name before being taken over by PWA a year later. The merged airlines were renamed Canadian Airlines before they too were taken over and merged into the still extant Air Canada.
There is no date on the card below but judging by the fashion I would say early 60s.

Now, I don't normally advertise in my blog but it would be remiss of me not to mention that the card above is from https://postcardinalclub.com/
If you're stuck for a gift for the postcard lover in your life or if, like me, you want to get something cheerful in the post then you can subscribe to get one or two vintage cards monthly or a single one off card.

The Planes, The Planes

I thought I would show something quite modern, by my standards, for today .

This card was sent to me in 2002 by my brother and was issued to commemorate the Commonwealth Games which were held in Manchester that year.

Just to show how quickly things change, only one of the airlines depicted on the card, British Airways, exists under that name today.
The other three, Air 2000, Britannia and bmi have all merged into other airlines.

Air 2000 had the shortest run, operating between 1987 and 2004 before being merged with First Choice Holidays in 2008 and later with Thomsonfly to create Thomson Airways. The aeroplane on the card is an Airbus A321.

Britannia Airways was once the largest chartered airlines n the UK. It was founded in 1961 as Euravia and was renamed Britannia in 1964. It is probably best remembered in the UK as being the subject of a docusoap, ubiquitous in the 1990s, in 1998 called Airline. In 2005 it was rebranded as Thomsonfly which as we saw above eventually became Thomson Airways.

British Midland International (bmi) has the longest history of the airlines featured and operated under a number of names during its lifespan. Founded in 1938 as Air Schools Limited, as a school for training pilots, it changed its name to bmi in 1964.
The airline had two subsidiaries, bmibaby which is also defunct and BMI Regional which is still operating in the UK and Europe.
BMI itself was integrated into British Airways in 2012.

 

Cambrian Airlines

It's not just places which disappear from the map. Companies can also cease to exist for a variety of reasons and it is one such company I'd like to look at today.

While the bikers who visit during the TT will arrive via the ferry, I'm sure some of the crowds will have flown in to Ronaldsway. However, they won't have done so by Cambrian Airlines.

Cambrian Airways was a UK based airline which operated between 1935 and 1974 before being incorporated into British Airways in April of that year. The Isle of Man was one of 16 destinations flown to by the airline. The company used several types of aircraft including the now retired Viscount Vickers 701 which is shown on the card below. These types of craft were last flown commercially in 2008.

The plane on the card above G-AMOO was scrapped long before then.

The website below gives precise information about this particular plane. I won't go into details here other than to say that it was built in Bournemouth in 1953 and sold to Cambrian Airways in 1966 and it remained with them until 1970 when it was withdrawn from service on 19th December that year. It sold for scrap in October the following year and broken up.

The card above is not dated but form the colours we can tell it's from 1969 as this was the year it was painted  in the Cambrian Airways 'BAS - British Air Services' livery.  So, the airline, the aircraft type and the aeroplane all no longer exist. It really is a postcard from a vanished world.

For the full story and for information on other Viscount Vickers planes please see below.

http://www.vickersviscount.net/Index/VickersViscount028History.aspx