Spantax - Jet Age

Jet Age

The airline entered the jet age when in February and May 1967 two Convair 990 joined the fleet after being purchased second hand from American Airlines. Between 1968 and 1972, an additional eight Convair 990s would join the fleet; two of which were leased to Iberia between 1967 and 1969 whilst that airline experienced delays in the delivery of its own Douglas DC-8s. On 5 January 1970, a CV-990 crashed shortly after take-off from Arlanda Airport in Stockholm after it had experienced problems with one of its engines, killed five of the seven passengers on board. Another of the Convairs crashed on 3 December 1972, on take-off at Los Rodeos in Tenerife on a flight to Munich. The aircraft reached a height of 90 metres (300 ft) and crashed 325 metres (1,066 ft) past the runway, killing all 155 passengers and crew on board, making the crash the worst crash in Spanish airline history at the time.

A Convair 990 of the airline on a flight from Madrid to London was involved in a mid-air collision with an Iberia McDonnell Douglas DC-9 over Nantes on 5 March 1973. The Spantax aircraft lost part of its left wing, and its pilots managed to land safely at Nantes Airport; however, the Iberia DC-9 crashed killing all 68 passengers and crew on board. The airline acquired a further four Convairs from Swissair in April, May and June 1975, and the airline would become the world's largest operator of the type. The last of the Coronados was retired in the mid 1980s.

Requiring an aircraft with intercontinental range, Spantax purchased two Douglas DC-8-61CFs from Trans Caribbean Airways in February 1973, and would go on to operate an additional four of the type. Two DC-9-14s were acquired from Southern Airways in April 1974 in order to meet demand on charter flights on domestic and European routes. In October 1978 the airline put into service its first wide-body aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, and put it into service on charter routes to the United States. By 1980 the airline employed 1,168 people, carried 2,017,000 passengers and had revenues of 9.953 billion pesetas.

On 13 September 1982 Spantax Flight 995 to New York City crashed after an aborted takeoff in Málaga. The DC-10 overshot the runway and crossed a highway before colliding into farm buildings, whereupon a fire broke out in the rear of the fuselage. Fifty of the 394 passengers and crew on board the aircraft were killed. In 1983, Spantax became the first Spanish airline to fly to Japan via the polar route, with a stop in Anchorage, and in the same year Boeing 737-200s began to be added to the fleet, to replace the DC-9s. New flights from Palma de Mallorca to Turku, Kuopio, Tampere and Vaasa in Finland were begun with the 737s in 1984, and in the August 1984 the airline undertook charter flights to Venezuela with the DC-10s in conjunction with Iberia and VIASA.