Crews within the 3 flights mixed without any priorities..supposedly our managers would fly with those in his flight to judge us but in reality they just cherry picked the bits they wanted, occasionally one would return to Heathrow and find the captain had been taken off the rest of the day and an office wallah would take over...often when there was a nice meal allowance..pure coïncidence. Did a Gib with Batman who did the trip to visit his barbers from his national service days...probably the most unpopular manager in BEA history, one who disregarded SOP and didn’t know anything about passenger comfort.
Rosters were great and if you found a victim then they just rubber stamped it. After my first child was born I put my rosters on the notice board with all flights up for grabs as I would rather dig the garden than go to work..sacrilege...but also instructed on Condors at Blackbushe in my spare time. Once got close to the 90 day legal limit without flying. Needless to say no one every took my airport standby but the money Med trips went like hot cakes.
The original two types were the flights 1-3; the Trident 3 was flights 4-5.
Was on the VC10 when North East was merged so no idea although great entertainment as most BEA pilots believed that their monitored approach was the dogs, North East and BOAC both had similar and in my view a much better procedure as did SR. The argument continues 40 years on and it’s a great sport suggesting that BEA got it wrong, didn’t do the first commercial blind auto landing and taught the world how to fly. It always goes quiet if I remind them of the accident history.