General Air

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General Air
Yakovlev Yak-40 of General Air
IATA code : (without)
ICAO code : GQ
Call sign : GENERAL AIR
Founding: 1962
Operation stopped: 1976
Seat: Hamburg , GermanyGermanyGermany 
Home airport : Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel Airport
Fleet size: 4th
Aims: national
General Air ceased operations in 1976. The information in italics refer to the last status before the end of operation.

General Air was a German airline based in Hamburg and based at Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel Airport .

history

Since its foundation, General Air has seen it as its task to open up the northern German coastal regions of the North and Baltic Seas for holidaymakers. General Air was launched in 1962 and linked Wangerooge , Helgoland and Sylt with the mainland. To use this came Dornier Do 27 and Thu, 28 .

In 1967 the first of a total of three DHC-6 Twin Otter joined the fleet and finally an HFB 320 Hansa Jet . Two years later, the shipping company Hapag and the banker Salb bought shares in General Air. Salb finally took over the airline and ensured that both the fleet and the route network could be expanded further. In 1969 General Air bought two Convair CV-440s that had previously been in use at Lufthansa . Another CV-440 , previously operated by the Swiss company Tellair , was added to the fleet in 1971.

In June 1972 General Air took over the first of what would later be five Yakovlev Jak-40s , which despite western avionics did not contribute to the satisfaction of the airline and passengers. Anyway, Russian technology was considered uncomfortable and uneconomical among passengers. Nevertheless, General Air used its Jak-40 on domestic German routes between Hamburg , Kassel , Lübeck , Düsseldorf , Frankfurt am Main , Munich and Saarbrücken .

Although further donors were found in 1974, General Air had to sell some routes that same year. In January 1976 General Air finally filed for bankruptcy .

Incidents

  • On December 18, 1970, the electrical system of the HFB 320 with the aircraft registration D-CIRO failed on a transfer flight from Hamburg to Cologne / Bonn . In order to get into visual flight weather conditions , the pilots flew towards the North Sea. In the absence of an airport visible between the clouds, an emergency landing with retracted landing gear was carried out on the beach on the Dutch island of Texel . Both pilots survived. The already damaged machine was finally demolished during the rescue.
  • On May 27, 1972, a DHC-6-100 Twin Otter (registration D-IDHC ) crashed on General Air flight 005 at take-off from Helgoland-Düne airfield . Eight of the 13 inmates were killed.
  • On February 19, 1975, a Jak-40 (registration number D-BOBD ) was steered away from the runway on landing in Saarbrücken to prevent the runway end from rolling over into a steep slope. The machine, occupied by 16 passengers, broke through a fence and collided with trees. Apart from the seriously injured pilot, no people were injured. The aircraft was written off as a total write-off.

See also

Web links

Commons : General Air  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Everyone gets a turn . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 1975 ( online ).
  2. A failure for the Russians . In: The time . No. 48 , 1975 ( zeit.de ).
  3. ^ Accident report D-CIRO , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on June 16, 2016.
  4. edxh.de
  5. accident report D-IDHC , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on 16 June 2016th
  6. Aviation: Flight 005 . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1972, p. 52 ( online ).
  7. accident report D-BOBD , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on 16 June 2016th