Another recovery day from my cold today, but I heard back from the guy with the Gatwick tower logs and he's only reached March 1973, with the implication he's had to stop and the next few months may not be forthcoming for some time, I've seen a lot of the tower logs, in the Surrey Archive, and they're fairly sparse anyway. You usually get type but not always, and almost never registration. 1973 isn't in that archive as far as I can remember.
But I think anyway there'd be one or two rotations maximum, and probably 1-11s and/or Comets. I doubt there'd be a smoking gun saying a Viscount or similar had been chartered because of a tech fault to a 1-11. So as a 727 certainly isn't ruled out, I'm going to view this as probably G-BAEF on the basis of other memories and circumstantial information, and put it into the "for further investigation" file.
The flight path is really not obvious, as we would have to have been flying south (regardless of where my Dad was, the photo does appear to be the leading edge and so must be heading south). Thanks for the info about the beacons and so on which I'll attempt to plot onto a map. It's also not impossible the sequence was wrong as the slides in general were jumbled. There's no time information at all of course anyway.
Does anyone know whether planes turn left or right after landing on 17 to return up the runway after landing? As we would have been seated with seatbelts fastened at the turn if the turn was to the right my father was certainly in the starboard window seat at that point, otherwise he was in the port seat. I can't think of any further clues or items to investigate, unless someone gets into a position to be able to photograph a 727 wing-tip from above (I have a few photos from underneath from the example in the museum of flight, but they're not very convincing). I might risk an email to Boeing actually.
And
rog747 - I've also become fascinated in 1970s package tour air travel since starting this project, and I'm starting to collect related brochures which remain elusive but fascinating when you find one. I can see myself spending a portion of retirement doing a lot more research into this area. These brochures were a fixture in the parental magazine rack from Christmas onwards, and we'd browse through them excitedly - Intasun I think, Cosmos, Clarksons, and so on. But so ephemeral, I expect most were pitched once the holidays were over.