to provide fully fledged scheduled air services on major domestic and international trunk routes. This resulted in a poor fit of many routes in British United's network of scheduled services, thereby making it difficult to offer sensible connections that could be marketed to the travelling public. It also represented the best network structure the late Sir Freddie was able to put in place under the then prevailing regulatory regime. British Caledonian, which BA acquired at the end of 1987 in what was widely acknowledged to be a rescue deal to prevent that airline from going under and its assets to pass into the hands of foreign-owned or -controlled competitors, had inherited British United's scheduled route structure at the time of its creation in late November 1970 when that carrier was taken over by Caledonian Airways. The most fitting description for the resulting network of domestic, European and intercontinental long haul scheduled services from Gatwick was a motley collection of routes resembling a rag bag. This made it difficult to develop profitable streams of transfer traffic using Gatwick as a hub. For this reason it was always going to be a challenge to persuade people to fly to Gatwick from relatively minor places like Genoa or Jersey in order to make an onward connection at the airport to what many people would consider secondary places in Africa or South America, and an even greater challenge to do this profitably. At the height of its commercial success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, British Caledonian managed to turn the dilemma the structure of its route network presented to its advantage by focusing on those routes that carried a very high proportion of potentially very profitable, oil-related, premium business traffic. It even managed to become the preferred carrier of many high-ranking oil industry executives based in Texas, the centre of the global oil industry, by providing convenient, hassle-free connections between Houston/Dallas, Lagos and Tripoli via the airline's Gatwick base. However, the downside of this initially successful strategy was that it made the company dependent on a small number of markets whose fortunes were tied to the commodity price cycle, in often unstable parts of the world, for most of its profits. Although this worked in British Caledonian's favour when the price of a barrel of crude oil was sky-high during the late '70s/early '80s, it started working against it when the oil