Originally Posted by
pax britanica
Rog 747, yes of course I overlooked the established practice of calling it a day and not flying at night (probably quite wise) on these empire type trips. A real adventure they must have been.
They would indeed have been civilised! Digressing a bit and, as previously noted, the last scheduled service on which the flight and cabin crew night-stopped with the aircraft and transit pax was probably the West African coastal service from Gatwick to Accra, which - in its final iteration - was operated by BCAL One-Elevens via Lisbon with the night-stop at Las Palmas. There the crew took the minimum rest, i.a.w. scheduled flight-time limitations, before continuing next day to Banjul, Freetown and Accra - as
WHBM noted on an earlier thread. I don't remember when that rotation was finally abandoned by BCAL, but it continued well into the 1970s.The fact that the service only operated once a week made it uneconomic to "slip" a One-Eleven crew in Las Palmas and thereby avoid night-stopping the aircraft. The return service mirrored the outbound, using the same crew for a four-day rotation.
That service had long been an odd-ball, however, as night-stopping aircraft had become uneconomic in the jet era, and unnecessary with increased frequency of services. Even in 1958, when
CAA lost that Viscount at Benina on a service from SAY (Salisbury) to London, the crew had changed at Entebbe. On duty just after midday and operating via Khartoum and Wadi Halfa, they were rostered to slip at Benina. At the time of the accident, at about 01:15 local time, they'd been on duty for 12 hrs 44 mins.