MEMORIES 215 looked at the first civilian flights out of Teesside Airport and, with the help of readers, established that an airline called BKS briefly, at the end of 1964, operated twice daily flights to London Heathrow.

BKS was a pioneering airline that started at Southend Airport in 1952 and bore the initials of the surnames of its founders: James Barnby, Thomas Keegan and Cyril Stevens.

“I wondered if you knew BKS planes also flew out of Greatham airport from 1953 to 1958,” writes Dorothy Peacock from Wheatley Hill. “Greatham airport was where the steel works are now on the outskirts of Hartlepool.”

Planes had been flying from Greatham’s grass strip since 1933, and for six months during 1942 a squadron of Supermarine Spitfires was stationed there to patrol the Durham coast, but there were very few military buildings. In 1953, BKS started civilian flights to Northolt airfield, in north-west London.

“A gentleman called Major Pilling, who had been in the army with the three founders, was the first to have the idea for package holidays from the North-East. Most of the BKS flights were from Newcastle, but we also flew to London from Greatham, when I worked there from 1955 to 1958. Our offices were in the old army billets on the airfield.

“Flights from Newcastle flew to the Isle of Man, Jersey, Lourdes, and then to Majorca. We went there for our honeymoon in 1959 – and we had to land to refuel at Orly airport in Paris!”