Hunting-Clan Air Transport
Hunting-Clan Air Transport was a wholly private, British independent[nb 1] airline that was founded in the immediate post-World War II period.
Its main activities were contract, scheduled and non-scheduled domestic and international air services that were initially operated with Douglas Dakota and Vickers Viking piston airliners from the company's Bovingdon base.
[nb 4][5] On 14 June 1952, Hunting Air Transport began operating quasi-scheduled low-fare services from the UK to East, Central, Southern and West Africa using Vikings.
Although this compared unfavourably with British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), whose regular scheduled services took only 24 hours, load factors averaged 93% during the first nine months of operation.
[5][19] These load factors were much higher than BOAC's, as a result of which the independents doubled the flight frequency on their London-Nairobi Safari/colonial coach route to once-a-week.
[5] In June 1953, Hunting and Airwork jointly launched a fortnightly Safari/colonial coach service between London and Salisbury, entailing one round trip per month by each company.
In June 1954, Hunting and Airwork launched a joint Safari/colonial coach service to West Africa linking London with Accra via Lisbon, Las Palmas, Bathurst and Freetown.
[21] In 1955, Hunting-Clan became the first British independent airline to operate state-of-the-art Vickers Viscount turboprop planes, when it took delivery of three brand-new series 730 aircraft.
The War Office specified exclusive use of state-of-the-art Bristol Britannia turboprops on the Far Eastern route as it had calculated that this would save the Government £1.75m each year compared with continuing use of the Hermes.
[22] By 1957, Hunting-Clan and Airwork converted their successful East, West and Southern African Safari/colonial coach flights into regular "third-class" scheduled services.
However, the Government forced the independents to maintain additional stops that were no longer needed, as a result of replacing Vikings with technologically advanced Douglas DC-6s and Vickers Viscounts.
To secure their traffic rights between the UK and the newly independent African nations, Hunting-Clan and Airwork began participating in revenue-sharing agreements with BOAC and the destination countries' flag carriers.
The company's poor financial performance accelerated the initiation of exploratory talks with the Airwork group about a potential alliance, including a full-scale merger of their air transport businesses.
This was followed by a public announcement of their airline subsidiaries' intention to amalgamate all commercial activities from June 1960, trading as British United Airways.
