Originally Posted by
captain.speaking
Can anyone provide any facts on the BOAC Boeing 707-436 services from
Heathrow to Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1962/63 ?
The published timetable shows these operating westbound via an unspecified technical stop, but non-stop eastbound. The scheduled elapsed time westbound is given as 13hrs00mins hours to LAX and 14hrs05mins to SFO,
which seems strange ?
I understand the tech stop on the westbound Los Angeles flight was at Winnipeg. The San Francisco flight made a commercial stop at New York. I don't know whether there was a crew change at Winnipeg, in which case they would have to go there, or if the crew worked through and they would stop wherever was best on the day. The eastbound does appear to be nonstop as the flight time is pretty much what it is today (ending with a 50-minute connection onto another BOAC flight on to Frankfurt and beyond !)
http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...62/ba62-06.jpg
http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...62/ba62-08.jpg
I've done a lot of London to California flying over time, I notice that the westbounds tend to go much further north than the eastbounds. I've been over Baffin Island and Calgary going west to LA, whereas the last time I returned from San Francisco we routed overhead Montreal.
Some of the trips in the late 1970s were on the Air New Zealand DC-10 that BA used to hire each day ( I believe the daily hire was actually of 1.25 aircraft as the plane to London set off from LAX a few hours before the inbound one arrived), and it was marginal for the aircraft westbound, if necessary the flight made a refuelling stop at Prestwick, which necessitated anticipating this the day before and sending a slip crew up there. When American Airlines took over from TWA about 1990 they used to put up a decidedly hand-drawn and annoted chart on the forward cabin wall showing the proposed track, which had all the hallmarks of having been carefully written out by the most junior member of ops, with ruler and sharp pencils.
Any of you old crews remember a VOR on this route in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming called "Crazy Woman", which in the days before political correctness and before passengers got upset if their beloved movie was interrupted, was regularly announced and commented on by the BA crew ?
Crazy Woman Creek - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia