Hi
rog747 and
WHBM,
This topic could merit a thread of its own, considering it marked BUA's planned switch from turboprop to jet equipment on short, medium and long-haul services. And thanks for bringing it to attention with the BUA Winter Timetable for 1964/5,
WHBM. Another of your blasts from the past...
You've alluded to the delay - though not the sad reasons for it - in delivery of the first One Elevens, which rendered that part of the plan unachievable. Thus the switch to jets was limited to the VC10s for the time being.
Early one Thursday afternoon in October '64, the first weekly BUA VC10 service arrived at SAY (Salisbury, Rhodesia) from Gatwick.. The operating crew would have indeed flown the a/c only from Entebbe, via Ndola and Lusaka. After an hour or two, however, G-ASIW took off again to do circuit-bashing for crew training. This probably became a regular feature for the BUA trainers such as W M (Bill) Evans and John Moss on Thursday afternoons in Salisbury for a while. I don't know if BAC training captains were still involved at that stage. There wold have followed a decent evening and night's sleep at "the pub", followed by a fairly leisurely start the following morning.
This was a typical example of an embryonic fleet with an urgent training requirement to cater for the pending delivery of G-ASIX, BUA's second Type-1103 (combi, with Super wing) VC10. (As you know, "IX" was eventually sold to the Sultan of Oman, and now resides back at its birth place of Brooklands.)
To answer rog747's questions in more detail: short/hot/high aerodromes were, as WHBM says, what the VC10 was particularly good at. At an elevation of 4725 ft, SAY was already fairly long (later to be extended to over 15,000 ft for sanctions-busting B707s and DC-8s) but Lusaka was less than an hour away. Lusaka (City) was/is only 6500 ft long at an elevation of 4200 ft and Ndola, at a similar elevation, may have been shorter at that time. But even the hop from Ndola to Entebbe was only two hours, so take-off weight was presumably not a problem. Entebbe, at 3789 ft elevation, would have been low enough to permit MTOW from the WAT (altitude and temperature) criteria, even in the afternoon, but the single runway was, at under 8000 ft in length, just a bit too short for that. The direct EBB/LGW sector of around 7:45 airborne was, however, do-able with a full pax load.
NBO/LGW direct, departing at lunchtime (see BR102) would have been more restrictive. The elevation of 5327 ft and the afternoon temperature of maybe 26C (ISA +22) would knock a tonne or so off the MTOW, and the typical flight time was over 8 hours. By the way, BOAC's standard VC10s, introduced to Africa about six months earlier, had the standard wing, which lacked the lower (8 deg) flap setting for take-off that gave a big improvement to the RTOW when the latter was WAT-limited. Contemporary B707s would have been seriously restricted out of Nairobi. (Years later, B707-320 performance out of NBO was improved considerably by the introduction of what was later known as optimised VR and V2, in which (as you know well) surplus runway length is used to accelerate to a higher V2, giving a better second-segment climb-gradient. But even that and the 707-320's lighter APS weight didn't allow it quite to match the earlier payload capability of BUA/BCAL's Type 1103 VC10s on NBO/LON direct.).
Quote from
WHBM on the West African service's scheduled night-stop at Las Palmas:
"What our grandparents got up to.."
Not sure about grandparents
but yes, I remember later in the 1970s when BCAL VC10 crews (two pilots, F/E, Nav and 6 cabin-crew) regularly positioned from Gatwick to Freetown to operate FNA/EZE/SCL when the a/c arrived from LGW. Like the One Eleven crew, we did stay at a different hotel from the pax. Unlike them, however, we didn't need to observe the 8-hour curfew (we positioned in civvies) and much of the night was spent in a local discotheque...
To nit-pick slightly, WHBM, don't forget that Airwork's Safari service extended also to so-called Central Africa (Ndola, Lusaka and Salisbury), the home of Central African Airways (CAA) with its rival "Zambesi" service to London. Until Rhodesia's UDI in late 1965, after which the BR211 terminated at Lusaka, BUA had also continued Hunting Clan's freight services through SAY to Johannesburg with the DC-6A.