Former Harrogate girl Kathy Willis flew all the way from South Africa to join nearly 40 former BKS Air Transport female cabin crew in a 'Millennium Re-Union' held at the Jarvis Parkway Hotel, Bramhope, Leeds, on Saturday October 30.1999

Kathy, who now works for British Airways in Johannesburg, joined 'old girls' from all over the UK who worked for BKS and its eventual successors - Northeast Airlines and British Airways - when they pioneered a web of regular scheduled services from what some of them are still apt to call 'Yeadon Airport'; now grown into Leeds Bradford International Airport (LBA).

Many of the girls' stories on the night  no doubt involved the humble Douglas DC-3 Dakotas - ex-military piston-engined planes which formed the back-bone of the original equipment used by 'Yorkshire's first real airline' - as the pioneering outfit was known to many of its staff.

Between the 1950's and 1980, 'Daks' of BKS, and later turbo-prop Avro 748 and Vickers Viscount aircraft flew to Paris, Dusseldorf, Belfast, Jersey, Guernsey, London and other points and put the then Leeds Bradford Airport firmly on the international airline map.

Many Yorkshire girls, and not a few from elsewhere, gained their first experience of flying with BKS and went on to serve with other airlines world-wide when British Airways closed its Yorkshire base in 1980. Principal movers behind the 'Millennium Re-union' were Wendy Storey, of Mirfield, who worked for all three airlines and ended up at Heathrow; and Carol Clark who still works at Leeds Bradford Airport on the Information Desk.


 Carol Clark tel 0113 250 9696
 Wendy Storey tel 01924 480791