Air Services, Allied Airways (Gandar Dower) and British Channel Islands Airways on 1 August, these independents continued to ply their scheduled routes under contract to BEA until they were absorbed into the corporation in 1947. The first flight operated by the newly constituted British European Airways Corporation departed Northolt for Marseille, Rome and Athens on the day of its formation at 8:40 am. This was followed by further route launches to Amsterdam, Brussels and Lisbon. Initially, BEA supplemented its ex-RAF Transport Command Dakotas with Dragon Rapides and Avro Nineteens. Between August and October 1946, BEA took delivery of the first 11 of an eventual 83 Vickers Viking piston-engined airliners. These were BEA's first new aircraft, which it leased from the UK government. The first Viking revenue service departed Northolt for Copenhagen on 1 September 1946. Compared with the Dakota, the Viking took 35 minutes less to reach Copenhagen from London. Following their introduction on the London–Copenhagen route, Vikings began replacing Dakotas on BEA's services to Amsterdam, Oslo, Stockholm, Gibraltar and Prague. In November 1946, BEA's first service to Northern Ireland departed Croydon for Belfast (Sydenham) via Liverpool, using an ex-Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 52/3m operated by independent airline Railway Air Services on the fledgling corporation's behalf. The following month, BEA's Belfast operations transferred to Nutts Corner while Dakotas replaced the "Jupiter" class Ju 52s from 1947. On 1 February 1947, the process of merging the wholly private, independent airlines operating in the UK under the AAJC umbrella into BEA began. Railway Air Services, Isle of Man Air Services, and Scottish Airways (which had been formed in 1937 by merging Northern & Scottish Airways and Highland Airways) were among the first independents merged into the new corporation. 1947 was also the year BEA operated its first scheduled all-cargo flight from Northolt to Brussels with a DC-3 freighter. The same year, it inaugurated a scheduled service between Land's End Airport in southwest Cornwall, England, and St Mary's Airport on the largest island of the Isles of Scilly archipelago off the southwest coast of Cornwall, using "Islander" class Dragon Rapides. Despite the previous year's nationalisation of several private airlines and their absorption into BEA, the government-owned carrier continued to contract its private sector counterparts to operate a limited number of regional feeder services on its behalf via "associate" agreements. These needed to be approved by the Air Transport Advisory Council (ATAC), the contemporary UK