first Gulf War, resulted in a sharp contraction of both the business and leisure travel markets. This in turn resulted in the spectacular collapse of the International Leisure Group (ILG) and its Air Europe airline subsidiary, at the time the largest independent airline in the UK and Gatwick's biggest user, accounting for one-fifth of all the airport's slots. The then prevailing harsh economic climate also resulted in route and schedule cutbacks at other major airlines operating out of both main London airports. As a result, it became much easier to obtain viable slots at these airports, including at peak times. This meant that none of the contemporary major long-haul carriers were showing any interest in commencing operations at Stansted (with the sole exception of American Airlines, which ran a short-lived Stansted—Chicago service during the early 1990s). In addition, Stansted's considerably smaller catchment area and its greater distance from most parts of London compared with Heathrow and Gatwick, combined with poorer transport links in relation to Heathrow's and Gatwick's better accessibility, meant that Air UK found it extremely difficult to make its Stansted operation viable. Rebranding In 1997, KLM became the sole owner of Air UK. This resulted in the airline being rebranded as KLM uk in January 1998, including the adoption of a new livery. The legal name changed from Air UK Limited to KLM uk Limited in April 1998. Initially, the rebranded airline launched new routes from London City serving KLM's Amsterdam Schiphol hub as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh. However, from January 2000, the KLM uk routes that did not serve Amsterdam were either progressively transferred to Buzz, the KLM group's new low-cost carrier, along with the remaining 146-300 aircraft or closed. KLM uk adopted this new strategy in response to its increasing inability to match the far lower costs of the rapidly growing "no frills" competition on the main London—Scotland trunk routes, especially Luton-based EasyJet and former British Airways subsidiary Go based at Stansted itself. By 2001, Buzz operated 14 point-to-point routes from Stansted. Many of these were former Air UK routes served with a fleet of eight BAe 146-300s handed down from Air UK and two independently sourced, second-hand Boeing 737-300s. In addition, scheduled routes not transferred to Buzz and serving destinations other than Amsterdam were eventually all withdrawn, thus reducing the network to only 15 routes exclusively linking regional UK airports to Amsterdam Schiphol. This