page_title: AirUK
section_title: Rebranding
hierarchical_section_title: AirUK / History / Rebranding
caption_attribution_description: English: A KLMuk BAC146 @ London City Airport
context_page_description: Air UK was a wholly privately owned, independent regional British airline formed in 1980 as a result of a merger involving four rival UK-based regional airlines. British and Commonwealth-owned British Island Airways and Air Anglia were the two dominant merger partners. The merged entity's corporate headquarters were originally located at Redhill, Surrey, the location of the old BIA head office. It subsequently relocated to Crawley, West Sussex. In addition to the main maintenance base at Norwich Airport, there also used to be a second major maintenance base at Blackpool Airport. This was closed down following Air UK's major retrenchment during Britain's severe recession of the early 1980s. In 1987, Air UK established Air UK Leisure as a charter subsidiary. The following year, Air UK shifted its headquarters to London Stansted Airport. When Stansted's new Norman Foster-designed terminal opened in 1991, the airline became its first and subsequently main tenant.
  Air UK was a full member of the International Air Transport Association for most of its existence.
context_section_description: In 1997, KLM became the sole owner of Air UK. This resulted in the airline being rebranded as KLM uk in January 1998, including the adoption of a new livery. The legal name changed from Air UK Limited to KLM uk Limited in April 1998.
  Initially, the rebranded airline launched new routes from London City serving KLM's Amsterdam Schiphol hub as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh. However, from January 2000, the KLM uk routes that did not serve Amsterdam were either progressively transferred to Buzz, the KLM group's new low-cost carrier, along with the remaining 146-300 aircraft or closed. 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. By 2001, Buzz operated 14 point-to-point routes from Stansted. Many of these were former Air UK routes served with a fleet of eight BAe 146-300s handed down from Air UK and two independently sourced, second-hand Boeing 737-300s. In addition, scheduled routes not transferred to Buzz and serving destinations other than Amsterdam were eventually all withdrawn, thus reducing the network to only 15 routes exclusively linking regional UK airports to Amsterdam Schiphol. This also resulted in the retirement of KLM uk's ATR-72s.
  In 2002, KLM decided to integrate what was left of KLM uk into KLM Cityhopper, its wholly owned, Dutch-based regional subsidiary. It also decided to sell Buzz to Ryanair the following year. 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.
caption: A KLM uk BAe 146 with a company Fokker 50 behind at London City Airport in 1999.
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