G-BEPS was the first Belfast to fly on the civil register (if we forget that XR362 was marked as G-ASKE by Short Brothers at one time - for publicity?).
The date was 14 Feb 78 and the deed was done at Manston. I was co-opted by TN who was about to join Danair on the 727 next day and we had the sadly-deceased Zebedee as the F/E.
For reasons that I am not totally prepared to tell you, the aircraft HAD to fly that day or else no more money was going to appear.
Manston was run by the RAF at that time and the CO and I had not been on the best of terms in the past so he was probably not best pleased to see me on his station conducting such a dangerous exercise as flying a Belfast which had not flown in 18 months.
The great day arrived and Manston was shrouded in fog! We did a couple of runs down the runway to make sure that all the "doll's eyes" worked and were then waiting for the weather to clear.
At this point, some old mates got airborne in a Geminair Britannia and I called them up and asked "what is the cloudbase?".
They knew we wanted to go flying so the answer was "well, we're at 1500 ft and we haven't got there yet" - so that was therefore logged on the ATC tapes.
And so it was that we got airborne in G-BEPS. We went "around" the cooling tower on the downwind leg twice before deciding that enough was enough.
I would dearly love to fly G-BEPS again.