I saw the following on another web site
http://www.airliners.net/discussions...d.main/128115/
Is this right, I thought BEA’s Tridents were the first - well before ’69.
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On 9 January 1969, a Caravelle of AIR INTER became the first aircraft in the history of civil aviation to land in actual CAT IIIa conditions during a commercial flight (Lyon-Paris). The operational approval was obtained from the SGAC (France) only two months before in November 1968. This approval was the direct result of successful flight tests made since 1963 during which automatic landing systems were tested (5 March 1963 at Toulouse: first automatic landing without visibility). Fail-operational automatic landing was first used for these types of operations, but it was found useful to develop fail-passive capability in order to satisfy airline requirements for dispatch and operational flexibility.