Great picture vintage ATCO and thanks for publishing it.
The Bulair 1969 programme was announced in the local rag (Evening Post) with the front page headline "RUSSIAN PLANES ARE COMING TO LUTON". They must have been desperate for headlines as one IL18 a fortnight wasn't exactly newsworthy, although it may have conjured up images of a squadron of MIG-15's as part of an invasion force.... As a newspaper that claimed to be in favour of airport expansion, it was very good at publishing stories designed to provoke anti-airport feelings locally.
Anyway, I missed the first flight on 7th June 1969 but made sure I was there, camera poised, for the next one on 21st. It ran a bit late, but eventually something trailing smoke appeared between layers of cloud, heading north around 4 miles east of the airport. Binoculars revealed it to be the long-awaited IL18. It turned away then reappeared on the approach a few minutes later. I watched it land and head towards me in the speccies car park. So excited was I to get my picture that I forgot to adjust the exposure on my Kodak Instamatic, so when the film came back from being developed my IL18 picture was so horribly over-exposed that no photo editing software has been able to render it worth publishing.
While I'm on the subject, does anyone remember, or have any record of, a Balkan IL-18, possibly LZ-BEK, visiting around March 1971? The only other Bulair/Balkan IL18 visit I know of post 1969 was LZ-BET which night stopped on 28th July 1971.