(France) UTA @·AIRCRAFTUBE

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Union de Transports Aériens

Union de Transports Aériens (UTA) was the largest wholly privately owned, independent airline in France. It was also the second-largest international, as well as the second principal intercontinental, French airline and a full member of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) since its inception.

UTA was formed in 1963 as a result of a merger between Union Aéromaritime de Transport (UAT) and Transports Aériens Intercontinentaux (TAI). The airline was a subsidiary of Compagnie Maritime des Chargeurs Réunis, the French shipping line founded and controlled by the Fabre family. During the post-World War II era, Francis Cyprien Fabre was the President of Chargeurs Réunis. Francis Fabre was also the founder of the original pre-war Aéromaritime and UTA's chairman from 1969 until 1981. Chargeurs Réunis held a 62.5% stake in UTA.

UTA's corporate head office was located in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. The company's main operating and engineering base was originally located at Paris Le Bourget Airport. In 1974, the firm moved its main operating and engineering base to the then new Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) near the northern Paris suburb of Roissy-en-France.

In 1966, UTA established a subsidiary company named Compagnie Aéromaritime d'Affrètement to give it a foothold in the rapidly growing passenger and cargo charter markets. UTA's charter subsidiary traded as Aéromaritime. Aéromaritime operated Airbus Industrie's Super Guppies (outsize Boeing Stratocruiser conversions) from 1971 until 1989 to airlift early-model Airbus airliner sections from Airbus's and third-party supplier plants in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain to the consortium's main plant in Toulouse, where final assembly took place.

UTA also had two sister companies. These were UT Hotels (UTH) and UTA Industrial Centre, respectively. The former owned and operated 17 hotels at the destinations served by UTA's worldwide scheduled network. The latter was the airline's maintenance arm. UTA Industrial Centre was located at its sister airline's original Paris Le Bourget base, where its headquarters remained when the airline shifted its operating and engineering base to Charles de Gaulle Airport.

UTA was an indirect shareholder in Air Afrique, the former multinational airline for francophone West Africa, as well through its shareholding in Société pour le Développement du Transport Aérien en Afrique (SODETRAF). UTA furthermore held a significant minority stake in Air Inter, the leading French domestic airline as well as the largest scheduled domestic carrier in Europe at the time. UTA moreover provided technical assistance to Air Ceylon, Sri Lanka's erstwhile national carrier when that country was still known as Ceylon.

UTA was absorbed into Air France between 1990 and 1992.

History

The decision to merge Union Aéromaritime de Transport (UAT) with Transports Aériens Intercontinentaux (TAI) was taken in September 1961, building on a commercial relationship between the two airlines that had begun in the early 1950s. UTA, the new company that succeeded UAT and TAI, came into being on 1 October 1963 with a capital of £2.6mn.

Formation and early years

At the time of its inception, UTA employed 4,900 personnel (including 630 aircrew) and inherited a fleet of 35 aircraft from its predecessors, comprising six jet aircraft and 29 piston engine airliners. These were progressively repainted in UTA's new livery, a combination of UAT's blue and TAI's green colour schemes. The inherited 118,000 mi (190,000 km) network spanned five continents. Most of these were intercontinental, long-haul routes connecting France with West and Southern Africa. On 1 November 1963 UTA introduced DC-8 jets on its flights from Paris to Lagos, Accra, Monrovia and Freetown. UTA's creation coincided with a new French aviation policy that established exclusive spheres of influence for UTA and Air France. Air France withdrew from UTA's sphere of influence but UTA continued serving the African routes it inherited from UAT in association with Air Afrique. This included UTA taking the place of UAT in the joint revenue sharing agreement with Air Afrique. In addition, UTA continued providing commercial and technical assistance to Air Afrique on the same terms as UAT.

UTA had the largest African network of any European airline, flying to up to 25 destinations. Its busiest scheduled route was Paris—Abidjan, served daily in both directions. UTA primarily operated long-haul intercontinental scheduled services linking metropolitan France with most countries in francophone West and Central Africa, a number of countries in anglophone West and Southern Africa (including Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe), as well as Angola and Mozambique in lusophone Southern Africa, South Africa, Libya in North Africa, Malta, the Middle East (Bahrain and Oman), South Asia (Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore), New Caledonia, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and Los Angeles. In addition, the airline used to have regional traffic rights between Japan, New Caledonia and New Zealand, between South Africa and the French Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, as well as between Tahiti and the US West Coast.

Through most of its existence UTA was one of only four wholly privately owned, independent airlines outside of the US with a major, long-haul scheduled presence. Unlike its British, Canadian and Hong Kong independent contemporaries, for most of its existence UTA did not have a network of short-/medium-haul scheduled routes nor did it compete on any of its scheduled routes with Air France, the primary French flag carrier at the time. This made it an almost exclusively long-haul, intercontinental scheduled airline. It also made its scheduled route network complementary to Air France and Air Inter. (UTA and Air France used to co-ordinate their schedules at Los Angeles to enable passengers to connect between Air France's transatlantic and UTA's transpacific services.)

UTA during the 1980s

In 1986 the French government unexpectedly decided to relax its policy of neatly dividing traffic rights for scheduled air services between Air France, Air Inter and UTA, without any route overlaps between them. The regulatory framework governing France's air transport sector at the time had been put in place in 1963. It had prevented the country's three main scheduled airlines from operating outside their respective spheres of influence and competing with each other. The French government's decision to adopt a less rigid interpretation of its policy gradually reversed both of these rules. It therefore enabled UTA to launch scheduled services to new destinations within Air France's sphere of influence, in competition with that airline, for the first time. Paris — San Francisco became the first route UTA served in competition with Air France non-stop from Paris. (Air France responded by extending some of its non-stop Paris — Los Angeles services to Papeete, Tahiti, which competed with UTA on the Los Angeles — Papeete sector.) UTA's ability to secure traffic rights outside its traditional sphere of influence in competition with Air France was the result of a successful campaign it had mounted to lobby its government to enable it to grow faster, thereby becoming a more dynamic and more profitable business. During that time, UTA also planned to launch a short-haul European feeder network, which was to be operated by its Aéromaritime subsidiary. In the event, these plans were scuppered by a long-running, bitter industrial dispute between UTA's management and the unions representing the majority of pilots at Aéromaritime as well as at UTA itself. The dispute was about the introduction of new, lower pay scales at Aéromaritime to prepare it for the competition it was likely to face at the hands of Europe's new breed of much lower cost, aggressively expanding independent airlines, as exemplified by UK-based Air Europe at that time. It lasted for the better part of a year from the end of 1988 until October 1989 and resulted in the grounding of both Aéromaritime and UTA during that period. UTA's plans for a European feeder network were also overtaken by its subsequent merger with Air France.

1986 was also the year UTA lost its monopoly on the Paris—Papeete route to Minerve, France's leading contemporary charter airline.

In 1988 French Transport Minister Michel Delebarre partially reversed the French government's relaxed policy on allocating traffic rights to the country's three main contemporary scheduled airlines when he decided to deny UTA the right to fly non-stop from Paris to Newark in direct competition with Air France. The aim was to protect Air France's position as the country's dominant scheduled carrier by making UTA a less attractive takeover target for its foreign rivals in the event of a merger. The French government feared that Air France's smaller size relative to British Airways, Lufthansa and the US giants as well as its fragmented long-haul network put it at a commercial disadvantage in a liberalised air transport market. Air France, Air Inter and UTA were therefore encouraged to co-operate rather than compete with each other.

On 12 January 1990 UTA, along with Air Inter and Air France itself, became part of an enlarged Air France group, which in turn became a wholly owned subsidiary of Groupe Air France. On 18 December 1992, UTA ceased to exist as a legal entity within Groupe Air France.

Air France's acquisition of UTA and Air Inter was part of an early 1990s French government plan to create a unified national carrier with the economies of scale and global reach to counter threats resulting from the liberalisation of the air transport market in the European Union (EU).

Aircraft operated

UTA and its subsidiaries operated the following aircraft types and sub-types throughout its 29-year existence:

Throughout most of this time, UTA's "mainline" fleet strength stood at about ten to twelve aircraft only. The airline's small fleet size was conditioned by the nature of its operations, i.e. as a long-haul carrier serving most of its routes as multi-stop sectors at low frequencies of less than one flight per day.

1965 marked the beginning of a re-engining programme that saw UTA's fleet of six DC-8 series 30 turbojets gradually converted to series 50 turbofan standard.

In order to facilitate the smooth introduction of the DC-10 into its fleet, UTA joined the KSSU aircraft maintenance consortium, whose founding members were KLM, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) and Swissair.

In August 1981, UTA became the second customer to order the Boeing 747-300. It took delivery of the first aircraft to roll off Boeing's production line on 2 March 1983. The airline also had two Boeing 747-200s converted to 747-200 SUDs, thereby joining a select group of only three airlines that chose to have some of their 747-200s re-manufactured in this manner.

UTA placed its first-ever order for Airbus aircraft in 1987. The order was for six four-engined Airbus A340-300 long-haul widebodied jets. It included an option on a further six aircraft. The aircraft on firm order were to be delivered between 1992 and 1994, at a rate of two planes per year. It was intended that the newly ordered A340s would replace the airline's ageing DC-10s as well as facilitate its future expansion into new long-haul markets from the early 1990s onwards.

In 1989, UTA also ordered Boeing's twin-engined 767 widebody on behalf of Aéromaritime. That order had a value of US$250mn. It was for three -300ER aircraft. Air France's acquisition of UTA in 1990 resulted in it inheriting two of Aéromaritime's three 767-300ERs, thereby itself becoming a 767 operator by default.

List of UTA managing directors

  • Georges Fayet : 1963-1969.
  • Francis Fabre : 1969-1981.
  • René Lapautre : 1981-1990.

Incidents and accidents

There were five recorded incidents/accidents involving UTA aircraft. Four of these involved the loss of aircraft and three the loss of lives.

  • On 2 October 1964, a UTA Douglas DC-6B inherited from predecessor UAT (registration F-BHMS) crashed into Mt. Alcazaba near Granada, Andalusia, in Southern Spain. The doomed aircraft was operating the airline's scheduled sector from Palma de Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, to Port Étienne (as Nouadhibou was known then), Mauritania. There were no survivors among the aircraft's 80 occupants (seven crew and 73 passengers).
  • On 12 July 1972, a scheduled UTA flight en route from Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, to Paris was taken over by hijackers. There were two fatalities as a result of this incident.
  • On 10 March 1984, a UTA DC-8-63PF (registration F-BOLL) flying from Brazzaville, Republic of Congo to Paris CDG with an intermediate stop at N'Djamena in Chad was destroyed, following two consecutive bomb explosions on board the aircraft while it was on the ground at N'Djamena Airport. There were no fatalities since all passengers and crew managed to evacuate the aircraft before the second explosion in the central baggage compartment tore the aircraft apart.
  • On 16 March 1985, a UTA Boeing 747-3B3 (registration F-GDUA) was destroyed on the ground at Paris CDG when a fire was accidentally started while cleaning of the aircraft's cabin was in progress. (According to contemporary press reports, the fire was allegedly started by a cleaner who carelessly dropped a burning cigarette in one of the toilets.) The fire rapidly spread, engulfing the entire cabin in flames. This resulted in the aircraft's total destruction, which was subsequently written off. There were no injuries as a result of this incident.
  • On 19 September 1989, UTA flight 772, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 (registration N54629) operating the Brazzaville — N'Djamena — Paris CDG sector, was bombed 46 minutes after take-off from N'Djamena causing the aircraft to crash while flying over Niger. Investigations and court cases have implicated Libyan state actors in the bombing. All 156 passengers and 14 crew members on board perished. For nearly 20 years, this incident marked the deadliest air disaster involving a French-operated airliner, in terms of loss of life. As of June 2009, it ranks as the second-deadliest (after Air France flight 447) (This incident was briefly noted in Neil Peart's book The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa as he was on this flight just months prior.)

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    Source : Article Union de Transports Aériens of Wikipedia ( authors )
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