At the time 4-engined turboprops had little market, scheduled short-haul operators were no longer interested and the BAF sort of operation, of whom there were few in Europe was one of the few. The market for the larger and more costly to operate Vanguard and Electra had already fallen through, though the latter made an effective freighter.
An exception was Indonesia, mentioned above in the context of the ex-CAAC aircraft. A big country, this was because the government allowed independent domestic operators, but did not allow them to import jets, only state-owned Garuda could. As a result they were late operators of all three 4-engined turboprops, even the Vanguard, which all ran on some, several hours long, long-line hops along the length of the country. A lot of the Indonesian technical support came from Australia, who had long experience of both Viscount and Electra. However, if Bouraq, who got the ex-CAAC fleet, still had to buy such residual aircraft on HP, there was not a lot of money around there.
Propliner magazine had a couple of accounts of venturers to Indonesia into the 1990s who got some late rides on what were by then historic fleets, including even a chance air-to-air photograph from an Electra of a Vanguard, when they were both in the Hold at Jakarta. Mandala, Merpati, Bouraq and others were the operators. Alex Frater, in "Beyond the Blue Horizon", describes having been assailed by the various independent carrier touts when he approached the Garuda check in at Jakarta, with that valhalla, an IATA fully interchangeable ticket, who assured him that unlike their own carrier his onward Garuda flight was late, cancelled, overbooked and Bad Dinner. All at the same time, seemingly !
Last edited by WHBM; 22nd Dec 2018 at 20:25.