fares by about 10–15% on each route where it competed with them. This, in turn, provided the impetus for the formulation of a new scheduled service strategy, which was internally known as the New European Airline Project (NEAP). The new strategy centred on Air Europe providing competitively priced and timed scheduled services on the eleven busiest international European trunk routes from its Gatwick base. The first batch of services was to be inaugurated with four brand-new Boeing 737-300s Air Europe had then on order, in a single-class, high-density configuration, at a frequency of two round-trips per day. All flights were to offer a full on-board service. The early morning outbound service from Gatwick was to be the earliest flight of the day from any London airport to each of the destinations to be served. The late evening inbound service to Gatwick was to be the last flight of the day to any London airport. Air Europe hoped that offering the first flight out as well as the last flight back would strengthen its competitive position vis-à-vis its rivals by giving passengers a longer day, thereby helping them to cut down on overseas accommodation costs. Other important reasons for choosing these departure and arrival times at Gatwick for Air Europe's proposed network of short-haul, international European scheduled services were the availability of slots at an increasingly congested Gatwick and the in-built bias in travel agents' computer reservation systems. The former meant that the only competitively timed slots that were then available at Gatwick due to the airport's tight slot situation were early morning and late evening slots. Operating the first flight of the day displayed that flight at the very top of a travel agent's VDU screen. This automatically accorded it the highest priority among all the flights listed on the agent's screen and, therefore, made it more likely to be booked in a typical travel agency's high-pressured work environment. Air Europe submitted its application to launch scheduled services from Gatwick to Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich, Zürich, Geneva, Rome, Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen to the CAA in November 1986. It requested the CAA to approve its application in time for a spring 1987 launch. Eventually, services commenced in December 1987 to Munich, followed by Paris-Charles de Gaulle in February 1988 and Brussels in April 1988. Establishing a regional airline operation In June 1988 ILG took over Connectair, a small, Gatwick-based