BOAC B707 ops in the 1960s

[Airbanda]

IME of watching 28 arrivals from Hatton Cross area the 707 was the noisiest of all. Actually painful to hear - as implied above some was probably aerodynamic noise as well as engines.

[Discorde]

One of the blockbuster's 707 legs will probably be HNL to LAX or SFO, daytime ops. Was Loran available for the whole route? If not, apart from sun posn lines, were there other nav techniques apart from DR?

Thanks for info.

[Spooky 2]

Good Loran was available along these routes both day and night. Cel nav was a back-up until dual Doppler came along and then the Loran was used to back that up. The joke was if you were going from HNL to LAX and when you hit land fall and there were no lights you should make an immediate left turn since you are probably over Mexico.

[Lordflasheart]

Consol/Consolan

Discorde - You could throw in a couple of position lines from the SFI Consol (Consolan) station that Spooky 2 remembers from this thread a while back -
See his post 32. Your man will have to know how to count ....

http://www.pprune.org/aviation-histo...on-aids-2.html

LFH

[Spooky 2]

Ah yes the Consolan station up near the Pt Reyes VOR. Used on occasion just for grins but don't recall ever needing to use it for a position check.


Regarding the LORAN reception...as I recall there was a LORAN station near Barking Sands on the Hawaiian chain and another one up near Anchorage. They created excellent LOPs to work from when going back and forth to HNL.

[Discorde]

Thanks chaps. Yet more questions:

Which F/D did the BOAC 707s have: Collins, Smiths (or none)

How was A/P hdg adjusted: bug on capt's HSI or remotely?

How noisy was the cockpit? Was 'headsets off' feasible for oceanic/HF/SELCAL ops?

Were there two Loran sets for redundancy?

Thanks (again) for info.

[WHBM]

Am I correct that you could home in on BBC Radio 2 long wave at Daventry from halfway across the Atlantic, getting you to within 80 miles of London ? Did you have the kit to give the direction ?

[Meikleour]

Discorde:

Flight Director was a Collins(forget the marque) with command "diamonds" at the extreme edges of the instrument. Thus a left turn command caused the diamonds to rotate anti-clockwise, then as the bank angle was reached they then moved clockwise to line up. Very un-intuitive!

Heading changes by both HSI knob and centre panel turn controller.

Cockpit - noisy. Same as B737 but faster (ie. M0.79) hence more wind noise.

Headsets were kept on one ear since the quick fit O2 mask clipped onto the headset.

BBC Droitwich transmitter tuned on the ADF and pointed!

[Discorde]

Thanks for your input, Meikleour.

The joke was if you were going from HNL to LAX and when you hit land fall and there were no lights you should make an immediate left turn since you are probably over Mexico.

Nice one! Might use that in the saga

[Airbanda]

Am I correct that you could home in on BBC Radio 2 long wave at Daventry from halfway across the Atlantic, getting you to within 80 miles of London ? Did you have the kit to give the direction ?

The former Radio 2 Long Wave transmitter using 1500m/200khz (now Radio 4 198khz) is at Droitwich. Daventry, closed in the nineties, was Short Wave for the Empire/World Service. Dav's claim to fame is that it provided the signals for proving the concept of radar in experiments carried out barely a mile from where I sit now.

[ian16th]

I lived in Droitwich for my last 6 years in the UK.

As I drove past the Tx, on my way into Brum every morning, I received Radio 4 on the car radio, irrespective of which frequency the car radio was tuned to! Or if it was on an AM or FM waveband.

[Capetonian]

Were the PAX in these days much more exclusive than today, or was there still a mixed bag of people?

I was reading the easyJet report yesterday regarding the extra runway for LHR or LGW debate and was surprised to read that 85% of LGW pax are leisure/VFR, and 65% of LHR pax the same. I would have expected a higher proportion of business travellers, particularly out of LHR.

[Stanley1]

707-436

I think the 436 had KIFIS. Kolsman integrated flight instrument system as it was called then.

[evansb]

BOAC Boeing 707-436 G-APFO c/n 17716 at Honolulu 19 January 1969. Photo HW Bailey (c):

[ExSp33db1rd]

I think the 436 had KIFIS. Kolsman integrated flight instrument system as it was called then.

Agreed.

Were there two Loran sets for redundancy?

No.

Consol - maximum 60 counts. i.e. dots, gradually building up to a single tone then gradually subsiding to positive dashes. One might count 20 dots and 32 dashes = 52, the missing 8 in the constant tone would be divided between dots and dashes, halved and added to each, so count would be 24 dots, which would be the position line to plot from the consol grid printed on the chart ( the first character, be it dots or dashes decided the type of count.)

One tried to hear as many positive dots or dashes as possible before the tone created a discrepancy, thereby reducing the error, so one would be straining to hear the difference, having got to, say, 26, 27, 28 when the door would burst open and a female voice would shout - "anyone for a cup of tea?" Oh, Christ, shut up, start again - 1,2,3,4 and so on!

There was also a Consol station at Nantucket ( 194 Kc ? ) but in my experience, if by the time one was in range one needed it then one had bigger problems to consider ! I don't recall it being much use on the N.Atl. tracks that we normally used.

There seemed to be a tendency to get slightly South of track when on a Southerly track approaching 10 West from the West - or maybe it was just me not paying attention. One of the old Coastal Command skippers agreed with me, and reckoned that there was a "blip" in the magnetic variation printed on the chart at that point.

Happy Days.

[WHBM]

Originally Posted by evansb

BOAC Boeing 707-436 G-APFO c/n 17716 at Honolulu 19 January 1969. Photo HW Bailey (c):

Aloha Airlines BAC One-Eleven 200 to the left of the Pan Am fin in the background (and maybe a second one alongside it behind the Pan Am).

[evansb]

Re: Aloha BAC 1-11 (Thread drift) - Yes, I believe you are correct. Is that an Aloha Viscount tail visible just above the aft portion of the 707's fuselage?

[Instruments]

Kollsman Sky Compass

Hello Lordflasheart, do you know how can I get a pdf of the operating instructions for the Kollsman Sky Compass? I have a Kollsman and a Russian Sky Compasses and I would like to compare them as both claim a precision of ½ deg.

[Lordflasheart]

Hi, Instruments -

Apart from the extract from my 707 flying manual shown in my Post 137 Jan 8th 2015 in this thread, the short answer is no, sorry. My local Nav God has recently been carried away to the stars so I can't ask him just yet. ExSp33db1rd (of this parish) was another Nav God and may well have more, as he is still going strong.

I only used the Kollsman and Kelvin Hughes periscopic sextants. Never used the Kollsman Sky Compass, which was fitted only on BOAC 707-336 aircraft for polar daytime nav (London to Anchorage) where two Navs were carried. I believe its full title was the "Kollsman Polarised Sky Light Compass."

I suspect that anything more than the page referred to above could well have been passed on by personal instruction in flight.

I don't think I have anything more, but I will have a look around.

LFH

[Discorde]

I might have to divert my 707 into Sondestromfjord. Latterly the approach into BGSF was LOC/DME. Was that the case in the late 1960s? Was there SRA or PAR available? Did crews use weather radar to assist with nav (terrain) orientation?

Thanks for info.

Edit: The field was under USAF control in the 1960s, so the approach aids would presumably have catered for military aircraft.