Hi WHBM,
Thank you very much for your reply to me and also for your earlier reply to the original poster, CaseyC.
Do you know the cn or sn numbers for the Lockheed Constellation L-649A aircraft given the registration numbers N 6001 C to N 6020 C inclusive? Presumably cn means construction number and sn means serial number (of manufacturer). Does N stand for 'number'? Does C stand for 'Constellation'?
Do you know the names given to the rest of these aircraft? Presumably, they are all named after US States, as is the case in N6007C "Star of Ohio", Lockheed builders number 2643.
The TWA timetable to which you have provided links, is actually dated September 25, 1955 and is different to the timetable that applied at the time of my flight, to New York, on flight 963/20, which departed London on Wednesday, July 20, 1955.
I have been unable to find, on the internet, a TWA timetable that applied to July 1955 (apart from a picture of the front cover that featured Disneyland). However, I have been able to deduce, with certainty, that in July 1955, there were two Flight 963 per week, which originated, on Wednesday and Saturday, from Frankfurt and stopped at London and Shannon and sometimes Gander en route to New York. I don't know what time the 963 Flights departed Frankfurt, London and Shannon but I have found, from online Passenger Manifests that, with one exception, the nine arrivals in New York, in July 1955, all arrived between 9:35 am and 10:47 pm, local time i.e. 'Daylight Saving Time' or 'Eastern Daylight Time'. There is no evidence that anyone used Eastern Standard Time for these records. My flight arrived at 10:13 am on July 21, 1955. I have looked again at the original record and realized that the wayward '13', written above the other numbers, was in fact connected to them - so I have answered my own question from my previous post.
After making my previous post, I discovered that it is possible to browse the Passenger Manifests in the ancestry.com records for the 'New York Passenger lists, 1820-1957', which are found under the heading 'Immigration and Travel'. Click on 'browse these records', or similar wording, then enter the year, then the month, then the day, and then click on 'not stated', in the list of names of ships. Click on search, and you get all of the Passenger Manifests for the date entered of all passenger carrying aircraft that landed at La Guardia or Idlewild airport in New York City for that day.
There were about 120 t0 250 passenger manifest for each day, for the records that I searched between 1950 and 1955. It is possible to click on 'previous' or 'next' to browse the records sequentially or one can enter the sequence number and hit 'enter' or click on 'go', to bring up any particular Passenger Manifest.
The Passenger Manifests are normally sequenced in the alphabetical order of the airline, so if one is interested in TWA, one should start looking at the end of the sequence. Sometimes there are also 'strays' at the end.
Within each airline, the Passenger Manifests are arranged with the main immigration summary page at the front. This contains the itinerary, the time and date of arrival, the number of US Citizen passengers and the number of alien passengers, and also the crew list. Then after the summary page, comes the individual Passenger Manifests for each airport at which passengers boarded the aircraft.
These bundles of Passenger Manifests are normally arranged sequentially, within each airline, based on the flight number. So, TWA Flight 963/20 will come after TWA Flights with lower numbers which arrived in New York City, in this case, on July 21, 1955.
The Flight number suffix, eg '/20', refers to the scheduled date of departure. So, in the case of the errant Flight 963/13, this Flight was due to take off from Frankfurt on Wednesday, July 13, 1955. In fact, Flight 963/13 departed late from Frankfurt - on Thursday, July 14, 1955 and arrived in New York City at 12:13 am on Friday, July 15, 1955.
It took me four days of intensive research on the ancestry.com website to deduce all of this, so I am passing on the fruits of my labours to facilitate the research of other members of the 'Professional Pilots Rumour Network'. I think that this should be entered by the moderators as a new topic, so that it can be disseminated as widely as possible for the benefit of other researchers.
