Originally Posted by
Hew Jampton
The story I heard about Johnny 'Full Tanks' Welford (no idea where that nickname came from) was that there had been a management complaint that he was not doing enough in his in-flight PAs to entertain the pax. On his next flight he appeared from the flight deck into the cabin, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a guitar, and sang to the pax. I heard this at White Waltham; perhaps he had been a member there.
There are five pages about John Welford in Bill Innes' 'Flight from the Croft' (
see here). The 'I might fly this thing myself' story is included, but the author also explains that this particular tale did the rounds for many years and got embellished in every retelling. Some of these same anecdotes are in an earlier book, Bob Price's 'Life on the Airliners' (
this one), but I guess that in 1991 Captain Welford was still around as names have been carefully omitted. A nice one from Innes' book was that Welford kept a one-move-a-day chess game going by transmitting his move on a common frequency during his daily flight so Sumburgh. The next day his opponent, a controller on the same frequency, would transmit his counter move. The author, his co-pilot for a two-week rotation, didn't know what was happening at first and thought that Welford had lost his marbles.