It was certainly an interesting period.I entered the industry as an apprentice in 1965 and by that stage Qantas was buying their second fleet of B707s.
The domestics were way behind with a mix of pistons,propjets and the new
B727s.
Ben S has an interesting comment in his blog today about the attempt by TAA to fly Caravelles. He seems to say they were dangerous but its not the way I remember them and a quick search looks like they had an hull loss rate of about 8% of the production run which was pretty good for that era.I suspect that the jets of the era all had similar if not worse records.
The early French Caravelles from Noumea that came into Sydney had drogue chutes which had to be retrieved if they were deployed. Lots of fun in the wind while the runway was closed down. Later ones had more conventional ways of stopping methods.
As I remember it, TAA and Ansett ended up with Electras rather than Caravelles which was a far better result and later when the Lockheed scandall broke there was a distinct Australian connection that included the
L188s and C130s.
Many years later I was in Singapore for one of the first airshows there. I was with a group of pilots who were ex Orions and knew the Lockheed reps there.
At the time we were told that Lockheed was considering a stretched Electra for runs like Sydney/Melbourne because the 10 minutes longer flight time was more than off set by the substantailly lower fuel burn per pax.If that had happened they would have made pretty good freighters in later life.
Wunwing