Originally Posted by
WHBM
As those who handled these routes at the time may recall, there is a longstanding airfreight demand from Europe southward to Africa, comprising all sorts from medical supplies, car parts, electronics, in fact just about anything that you don't want to turn up 3 months later via seafreight and onward overland transport with more than half smashed or pilfered. Return loads not much. This suited the MTOWs of sea level takeoffs in Europe compared to the hot & high ones in Africa.
Yes, as a boyhood example I well remember in the early 1960s the long and frustrating wait to complete my collection of
War Planes of the Second World War by William Green...
In the 1970s on our passenger schedules, of course, we crews used to stash all sorts of stuff away in the bulk holds of VC10s and B707s when departing from East and West African airfields, the most popular items being fruit - often packed in tall, wicker baskets with lids, one of which we still use in my household for dirty laundry. During the sugar shortages of 1973(?) in Blighty, when I was on the VC10, the Nairobi street market supplied two-kilo, brown-paper bags of golden granulated that kept us going through the crisis. Then, during the Heath power cuts, I remember bringing back an excellent Tilly lamp - later much surprised to find it was Chinese-made...
Originally Posted by
WHBM
Nowadays with more capable and capacious aircraft, the northbound cargo space available is what has driven the fresh foodstuffs and flowers export development from East Africa to Europe. Sometimes argued against by the Greta team for airfreighting, but in fact it's just taking advantage of marginal capacity which otherwise always returned empty.
Quite. In the early 1960s BUA operated an ex-Hunting Clan freighter service with a DC-6A via SAY to JNB (which, IIRC, also carried a few pax). There was also TMA with DC-4s and DC-6A. But, from the late '60s into the 1970s there were Transglobe/Tradewinds with CL-44s and then B707-320Cs; IAS (DC-8-50F?); Trek Airways (B707-320C with uprated JT3Ds); Jack Malloch's Affretair, based in Salisbury, for which the runway was greatly extended for sanctions-busting; and several others whose names elude me.
Originally Posted by
WHBM
I did hear that the main time the pax cabin was full northbound was when all the expat kids were returning to boarding school, apparently flights that were an interesting challenge for the cabin crew. I wonder if you could make any reduction in allowable weight per pax then.
That figure I floated of 100 kg per adult with baggage is just a rule of thumb that many of us have long used as one of the gross-error checks of a loadsheet that typically arrives on your lap a few minutes before departure. In my experience, baggage was weighed but standard figures used for pax weights. They are higher now but, in the 1960s/70s, these were (kgs): M = 75; F = 65; Child (below 12 yrs?) = 39; Infant (below 2 yrs) = 8. But, if he wanted to make himself really unpopular with the station staff, the skipper could demand that each or some of the pax be individually weighed. I think this was done sometimes for the school children you mention!. Human nature suggests that, in view of the delay involved, it would only be done if the skipper was persuaded it might avert having to off-load firmly-booked passengers...