I first flew Moscow on the T2 in 1972. There was what you might call a non cooperation pact between the corporations in the BEA management created an open hostile atmosphere towards BOAC; probably they rightly believed that the government would get BOAC to sort us out. That's the reason behind the timetables. (BEA wouldn't give concessionary flights to BOAC).
This was a time when the BEA guys were flying through thunderstorms in the Berlin corridors because of the risk of being shot down. We used to look out for Russian fighters but I never heard of one being seen - the closest I ever came to anything exciting was seeing a ground to ground missile tracking low level across Germany at night.
We carried Helsinki alternate fuel and there were occasions of tech stopping but probably because of take off weight restrictions. Interestingly BEA could operate into airfields that were closed to Swissair because of runway contamination - even more puzzling because the Munich disaster happened due to contamination and BEA had ignored two accidents.
One would have thought that a carrier who operated most winter days onto ice or slush covered runways would know better ;-)
The approach was different because the charts showed right angled tight turns and you basically made your own intercepts...sometimes going straight through the centre line and then turning back to intercept the ILS.
Fuel;
It wasn't until recently that I understood the fuel calculation policy in BEA...this has relevance to the tech stopping. Often the fuel was calculated at MTOW whatever the TOW and included contingency fuel. The fuel score was calculated on fuel burnt and didn't take into consideration of lower consumption at lighter weight - so was unduly pessimistic.
There was some other regulation that we had to arrive at destination with alternate fuel and 30mins holding; although a couple of management pilots would ignore this - the mentality carried on and nearly lead to the loss of a droop snoop and a 747.
Flying out of Nicosia I tech stopped in Munich or Frankfurt whilst Cyprus airways T2s steamed past us at high speed and flew direct.
Cyprus Airways was basically a BEA operation (AerLingus was also partly owned by BEA) except they had polished wings whilst we had the pealing red ones - this was banded around by our training department as to why they could do LHR in one hit.
In reality I think they understood the fuel policy better and minimum drag/ specific fuel consumption.
One has to understand that aviation knowledge still isn't cut and dried. A former colleague told me that when he went onto Concorde in the 80s they didn't understand how to operate her properly, that minimum drag was around 400 knots and they had been flying her around too slowly with engine failures.
I can understand there is more than a grain of truth in that as I thought I was going to loose the roof from my thatched cottage near Newbury one stormy night after an engine went into reverse upon rotation out of LHR. - The crew managed to nurse her to 3,000 ft over the Bristol Channel.
Similarly I made a contribution to gliding safety 15 years ago as winching wasn't being taught properly and only a month ago I questioned the control design on my latest paraglider (after a few hours of flying close to mountains and checking the performance).There are just so many variables in aviation.
So on the Nicosia and Tel Aviv some of the captains would get us wallowing along at M.8 instead of M.86 which gave a distinct lower nose attitude and hence, along with Ram recovery factor, a better SFC.
Tel Aviv.
Last week a colleague posted two horrific incidents on Tridents; the latter lead to an immediate visit to management and a conversion course onto the Transavia 737.
Very few pilots take into consideration Temp inversions. I nearly crashed into the Schwarzwald flying a MD80 because of the performance loss and windshear.
From Tel Aviv we had to cross the coast above 1,000 ft because of the military protecting the coast line. In summer it was impossible.
My colleague had got airborne (just) and at 200 ft they hit a strong inversion (and probably a tail wind).
The aircraft stopped climbing and faced with the looming Hilton and Sheraton hotels they fire walled the throttles - which didn't make an awful lot of difference on the Spey because of the fuel control unit except they over temperatured them and had to be changed.
They flew between the hotels and managed to eventually accelerate over the sea.
What had been demonstrated at Madrid a few years before after a T3 diversion following an engine failure out of Malaga was to lower the nose - clean up and accelerate to 230 - 260 knots and the Trident will climb and handle quite nicely.
(Madrid ATC lined up an Iberia aircraft on short finals - typical crap from some of the highest paid controllers).
I don't know the exact min drag speed as no one IIRC ever talked about it and climb performance is dependent on ram recovery factor as well but in descent the bird seemed to fly forever around 250knots.
On a political note I was never worried about Moscow as one forgets that without the Russians the Germans would have won the war.
From the 60s the corporations recruited civil pilots as "military" along with women, gays and Johnny Foreigner don't make good crew members. I was one of the Hamble "mafia" as a Sleazy Jet pilot called us.
It wasn't until I flew with ex post war RAF and Luftwaffe pilots that I realised that this was horse s@@t; Importantly they also told me that whilst they trained to fight the Russians the security briefing was that WW3 would be between Europe and USA.
Whilst America had the boom times in the 50s we still had rationing until 1953 (have my book of stamps still).
My father was a translator for de Gaulle ...he told me that Churchill and de Gaulle betrayed the resistance to the Nazis so that France would remain fascist (the files are in the national archives at Kew but restricted for 100years).
Whilst politically naive what the Troika gets up to along with Snowden's release on Clinton/Sarkosy/Libya and the latest Panama files probably shows that Russia was never a real threat and just a bogey man just as all Muslims apparently are.
Happy days.