[2][3][19] It had a staff of 1,700, carried more than 1m, mainly scheduled, passengers annually and had a fleet of 40 aircraft,[20] consisting of six jets (four ex-BIA BAC One-Eleven 400s and two ex-Air Anglia F-28 4000 series Fellowships) and 34 turboprops (including eighteen ex-BIA Handley Page Dart Heralds, ten ex-Air Anglia Fokker F-27 100/200 series Friendships and six Embraer 110 Bandeirantes originally part of the BIA, Air Wales and Air Westward fleets).

Apart from the four One-Eleven 400s, which were predominantly operated on charter flights,[20] all the other aircraft were part of Air UK's scheduled service fleet.

For marketing purposes, there was no gap between the letters "U" and "K" in the "Air UK" logo in the newly merged entity's first livery, which was a stylised Union Flag.

[20][21] Following the merger, most of the fleet progressively adopted Air UK's new blue, white and red colour scheme.

[19] Air UK's scheduled route network initially served the following 33 points: Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Basel, Belfast, Bergen, Birmingham, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Brussels, Dublin, Düsseldorf, Edinburgh, Exeter, Glasgow, Guernsey, Humberside, Isle of Man, Jersey, Leeds/Bradford, Le Touquet, London Gatwick, London Heathrow, London Stansted, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Ostend, Paris, Rotterdam, Southampton, Southend, Stavanger, and Teesside.

[24] Following British Airways' decision to retire its Vickers Viscount turboprop fleet and to withdraw from its loss-making regional scheduled routes, Air UK assumed BA's regional routes from Heathrow to Guernsey, Manchester to the Isle of Man, Leeds to Belfast and Dublin, and Edinburgh to Jersey in April 1980.

[9][29][30]) The severe recession of the early 1980s necessitated a major retrenchment, resulting in extensive frequency, route and staff cutbacks.

As a consequence of these cutbacks, ten turboprop aircraft (seven Heralds and three Bandeirantes) were withdrawn from service while the two F-28 jets were leased out to French regional carrier Air Alsace.

This in turn resulted in the closure of the former BIA engineering base at Blackpool, accounting for 220 out of a total of 400 job losses.

At the start of the 1981–82 winter timetable in November 1981, Air UK relaunched scheduled operations from Stansted by opening a new route to Amsterdam.

[33][34] In addition to the tough economic climate and merger blues during the airline's inception as a result of combining two organisations with vastly different cultures and management styles, the operation of these aircraft had largely been responsible for Air UK's poor financial performance that threatened the airline's survival.

[35] That year also saw Air UK joining forces with British Midland to form Manx Airlines, a new, jointly owned regional subsidiary based on the Isle of Man.

Air UK and British Midland hoped that transferring their loss-making Isle of Man operations to a dedicated, lower cost subsidiary would eventually make these services profitable.

The latter included the first stretched 500 series F-27s featuring an increased seating capacity of 52 (as opposed to 44 for all shorter fuselage F-27 models).

Reintroduction of jet equipment enabled Air UK to assume British Caledonian's regional operation between Glasgow, Newcastle and Amsterdam at the start of the 1985 summer timetable period,[5] thereby further strengthening its position as the UK's leading regional feeder operator at Amsterdam Schiphol and as the airport's largest foreign scheduled carrier.

This resulted in an order for four stretched BAe 146-300s to enable the launch of high-frequency services with up to seven daily round-trips on both routes from the start of the 1988–89 winter timetable period.

[9] Following the move to Stansted in 1988,[6] Air UK became London's third airport's biggest resident airline and its main scheduled operator.

Air UK's move to the new Norman Foster-designed terminal in early 1991 provided the impetus for the launch of several new, year-round scheduled routes linking Stansted with important business destinations including Belfast, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Inverness, Madrid, Milan Linate, Munich and Zürich[21] (in addition to the existing year-round scheduled routes serving Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Brussels, the Channel Islands, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Paris).

However, the unfavourable economic conditions in the UK at the time, i.e. the severe early 1990s recession and the fallout from the first Gulf War, resulted in a sharp contraction of both the business and leisure travel markets.

The then prevailing harsh economic climate also resulted in route and schedule cutbacks at other major airlines operating out of both main London airports.

This meant that none of the contemporary major long-haul carriers were showing any interest in commencing operations at Stansted (with the sole exception of American Airlines, which ran a short-lived Stansted—Chicago service during the early 1990s).

In addition, Stansted's considerably smaller catchment area and its greater distance from most parts of London compared with Heathrow and Gatwick, combined with poorer transport links in relation to Heathrow's and Gatwick's better accessibility, meant that Air UK found it extremely difficult to make its Stansted operation viable.

[39] Initially, the rebranded airline launched new routes from London City serving KLM's Amsterdam Schiphol hub as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh.

KLM uk adopted this new strategy in response to its increasing inability to match the far lower costs of the rapidly growing "no frills" competition on the main London—Scotland trunk routes, especially Luton-based EasyJet and former British Airways subsidiary Go based at Stansted itself.

This transaction constituted the final link in a long chain of events connecting the early- to mid-20th century decision of British & Commonwealth Shipping, a shipping company that could trace its roots to the 19th century, to diversify into commercial aviation through ownership of several of the post-/pre-war independent airlines that merged to form British United Airways, the UK's dominant private sector airline conglomerate of the 1960s, with what is arguably the world's most commercially successful airline of the first decade of the 21st century.