Previously in this thread I had stated that in priciple there is nothing wrong with smaller charter airlines and they shouldn't be criticised until we know how they perform.

However, Qman is correct. The people who are behind Tor Air are the same people who were behind Viking. And the people behind Viking were the people behind the downfall of XL. The main guy is Phil Wyatt (he was the guy in tears on TV on the day XL folded in 2008), but there are others too.

Long story short, XL failed in 2008, and were the biggest tour operator failure in the UK since the 1980s. They had rapidly expanded and bought other tour operators along the way; but in the end selling holdiays cheaper than it costs to provide them didn't work.

With days (literally) of XL failing, a new flight only website started up "Kiss Flights". On paper the guy behind this had worked for XL previously. The website was very similar to XL, some of the T&Cs were cut and paste, there was even a poorly edited section that referred to XL. They had chartered the Swedish airline Viking to do their flying. Viking had been going a few years, but rapidly expanded in 2009 under new owners, with new 737s (from XL!). Transpired later that the new investors in Viking were indeed Phil Wyatt and his assosciates.

As well as selling to Kiss Flights, Viking also picked up a lot of work for Goldtrail Holidays - who had been around a few years selling to Turkey, but were expanding to the Greek islands. The guy in charge of the new Greek programme was - you guessed it - from XL. And guess who got the new flying - Viking Airways!

What do XL, Viking, Kiss Flights, and Goldtrail all have in common? Of course - they are all no longer around. Thats the quick history from the last 10 years. If we want to go back to the 1990s we can add a load more companies to the list.

Tor Air are Viking reborn. Small independent Swedish airline suddenly gets new investors, expands its fleet, and starts charter work in the UK. Sound familiar? They have launched flytorair.com. It is a carbon copy of the Viking website. In fact, over the weekend it was demonstrated on another forum that there was a section of the new flytorair.com website that still displayed the Viking logos. This has now been fixed - they msut read the forums that criticise them!

I will say at this stage, Olympic Holidays are independant of all this. Their only connection is they are chartering these to do their flying. Unfortunately Olympic's predicament in being without an airline has provided the ideal opportunity for Wyatt and co to start the fiasco all over again. I guess Olympic have to take what they can get - I hope they know what they are doing.