Air Anglia was a wholly privately owned, independent[nb 1] British regional airline formed at Norwich Airport in 1970.

Created as a result of a merger of three smaller operators, the new entity became an important regional scheduled carrier during the 1970s, serving the Eastern half of Britain.

[2] Air Anglia commenced operations with a small fleet of Douglas DC-3 "Dakota" piston-engined airliners (see heading image) as well as a number of smaller, "executive" type of aircraft inherited from its predecessors.

The scheduled services between Norwich, Humberside, Teesside and Aberdeen allowed Air Anglia to commercially exploit the regular positioning flights it had been operating between these points since its inception.

This gave travel agents worldwide instant access to Air Anglia's connecting flights to/from Amsterdam via KLM's Global Distribution System, thereby enabling Air Anglia to improve its passenger loads on these services as well as helping KLM to boost its long-haul loads by delivering it additional transfer traffic from the UK regions to its Schiphol base.

One of these aircraft was used to launch a new, year round "cross-country" scheduled service linking the airline's Norwich base with Newquay in South West England via Birmingham in the English Midlands and Swansea in Wales.