blind pew,
Thanks. Am tempted to obtain your memoir - particularly after AJ's recommendation
- but, if it's as cryptic as your post, I'm afraid the juiciest chunks of it would go right over my head...
You and any other readers have no doubt detected some degree of bias and cynicism in my own post, and to be honest I never knew much of what was going on in the Corporations. We had gradually to accept that, apart from gifting us the Lagos route in 1971 (without which we would not have survived 1973/4), the government was only prepared to allow its much-vaunted "second force" scheduled carrier to compete with yours to a handful of destinations - and always from the sideline hub of Gatwick.
The creation of a second-force independent airline to compete against BEA and BOAC was the brainchild of the Edwards Committee, reporting to the Labour (Wilson) govt in 1969. IIRC, it recommended BUA and Caledonian as merger candidates, and in 1970 the newly-elected Tory (Heath) govt vetoed the possible takeover of BUA by BOAC, so Adam Thomson's (charter) Caledonian purchased the financially-ailing (schedule) BUA. Operations and engineering-wise, however, it could be argued that the BUA management ruled the roost - mainly because of its broader technical expertise, and experience in scheduled services. There was a good deal of tribalism between the two parties; the most evident area being the contempt that the Caledonian B707 fleet had for the VC10 operation and economics. But the moderating bottom line was always that the public and the government didn't owe us a livelihood... We nearly went to the wall in 1974.
There's irony in the fact that independent airlines seemed to do better under Labour than the Conservatives. In the early Eighties, we (and Laker) invested a lot of money in Anglo-European Airbuses in the hope of gaining more short-to-medium-haul routes. Our own A310 order was reduced to two when that didn't materialise, and they became instantly redundant when PC Yvonne Fletcher was murdered outside the Libyan embassy in 1984 - just as I was going off to Toulouse for my conversion course. (Undaunted, we became a launch customer for the A320 project!) Adam Thomson, R.I.P., was a benign, Scottish, socialist entrepreneur. Unlike your Lord King and - a little later - Richard Branson, he never attracted the support of Margaret Thatcher. His prediction that BCAL would not survive unless permitted access to Heathrow proved to be correct. Branson was soon to be permitted precisely that.
Well, that got some of it off my chest... Steering towards the on-topic, we did have a few stuffed shirts, if not primadonnas, in the left-hand seat, and there was more than a whiff of the Lodge factor - not that I could lay claim to have been affected. Yes, I've heard captains being dismissed in conversation as ex-flight-sergeants. We were far from perfect. But once I was in the mainline, I never felt inhibited to speak up - certainly not in an aeroplane. Perhaps we were also fortunate only to lose one passenger in our 17 years, and our operation was so much smaller than yours.
As for haircuts, blind pew, do you really think that being permitted to have long hair "like the Stones" was an indication of an enlightened flight-ops management? If so, ours would have failed dismally. One of my contemporaries, who was on the 1-11, used to wear a short-haired wig to hide his locks. Our VC10 chief training captain threatened me with dismissal from the fleet when I turned up for one of my line-training sectors with a modest amount of hair touching my shirt collar. I thought he was joking. When I tried light-heartedly to discuss it with the F/E en-route, he made it clear that - although the CTC/FTM had a reputation for a fairly bombastic approach to his authority - the admonishment was right and proper: "Long hair looks ridiculous when you're wearing a cap." (which we always did in public on the ground - unlike many of my BA colleagues in later years). I've never liked hats, but I believed in discipline and standardisation - and took the shilling.
On a less-trivial note, quote:
"In SR..I learnt how to throw a jet around with ease..no FD...manual throttle...final configuration at 400ft...speed stabilised later."
I'm surprised to see you advocating that, particularly on a jet (except the manual throttle bit, which was normally my preference when visual). Once bumped into an ex-BA guy in a bar in Geneva in the 1990s. I think I expressed a favourable impression of the company. He immediately embarked on a completely unsolicited rant against the safety of the operation, and particularly its obsession with fuel and time-saving on approach and landing. All total news to me, and I wondered if he was a crank with a grievance.
"A proper salary and all the bits that went with the best airline in Europe.
And of course a first class modern quasi military training establishment."
Inferring that you're a bit of a free spirit, I'm wondering what you liked about the quasi-military training establishment?