The bland livery was indeed a feature of the Berlin flights. In the beginning there had been ops by BEA (Viscounts), Pan Am (DC-6Bs) and Air France (DC-4s). BEA were the favoured ones by passengers, until Pan Am substituted 727s in 1965/6, and jets were it. BEA tried to compete with enhanced legroom and catering (the "Silver Star" Viscounts), but then ordered the One-Eleven 500s, which were the first of the stretched type. Air France meanwhile had become a lost cause and realised they were going to be zeroed out commercially, so came to this joint commercial arrangement with BEA, although it was mainly for politics to maintain a French presence on the Berlin Corridor, and in fact it was pretty much just a BEA operation, with little French visibility. Air France still ran a couple of nominal Caravelles a day from Paris, into Berlin Tegel (French sector), which until things transferred there fully in the 1970s was hardly used. A further commercial agreement later saw the Berlin routes carved up between the operators; Pan Am dominated on Frankfurt, and BEA on Hanover, always the shortest route with the highest demand.
Liveries of the aircraft did go back and forth, with repaints, initial ones in BEA colours, then later all were in the bland blue. They didn't have the range of the bulk of later One-Eleven 500s, as favoured by the Mediterranean holiday flight operators, just about 1,000 nm (say Manchester to Rome) was it. But that sufficed for BEA. On any one day, half ran from Manchester and half from Berlin, but they exchanged by through-routed flights through West German cities on several rotations per day.
As I understand the subsidiary switches issue, BAC on the One-Eleven and HS on the Trident did them opposite ways round. BEA wanted same as Tridents, for consistency, which BAC did for them but the CAA would not let crew be certified on both sorts - it was one or the other on licences. This really became an issue when BA took over B Cal in 1988, and ended up with equal numbers of both variants, so they were separated by base; if I am not mistaken the BEA spec at Manchester and Heathrow, while the standard/B Cal ones, including various further secondhand ones, at Gatwick and Birmingham. The smaller -400 series were originally with Autair, and came secondhand to Cambrian (I may have got a flight on the very first public operation - separate discussion), and thence into BA that way. They were, likewise, always kept apart from the BEA spec ones.
Last edited by WHBM; 8th Jan 2023 at 17:29.