First Choice Airways
Defunct Charter/In-House airline of First Choice
First Choice Airways Ltd. (previously Air 2000 Ltd.) was a British charter airline of European tour operator First Choice Group plc which from September 2007 became TUI Travel plc based in Crawley, England. The airline's operational and administrative functions were all based in offices at Manchester Airport. The airline launched in 1987 as Air 2000, rebranding as First Choice Airways in 2004 until its merger in 2008 with Thomsonfly to form Thomson Airways (today TUI Airways). It flew to more than 60 destinations worldwide from 14 UK and Irish airports. 70% of the airline's services were operated for its parent company, rising to 85% in the summer season, with the remainder on behalf of some 120 other tour operators. It also operated scheduled year-round leisure routes to Cyprus and the resorts of Spain and Portugal.
Its primary year round hubs were at London Gatwick Airport and Manchester Airport. The long haul services were sold only by internal companies such as First Choice Holidays, Eclipse Direct, Sunsail, Sovereign, Hayes and Jarvis and Unijet. In addition to these services the airline operated regular exclusive charter flights for Island Cruises a group joint venture with Royal Caribbean International.
The public source identifies “First Choice Airways” as defunct Charter/In-House airline of First Choice. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around First, Choice and Airways.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q928676. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2007, 1987 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “First Choice Airways” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.