Islandlad has reminded us of two other related threads:
http://www.pprune.org/aviation-histo...africa-10.html
and
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/5...ne-flight.html
I could merge them to this thread, but am hesitating. This thread is already awkwardly long, and merging would place all the posts in chronological order. The result would be that to pick out the newly merged posts, the reader would have to re read the whole (now longer) thread, as they would be scattered all along by date. If there is a persuasive reason to do this, it will be considered. In the mean time, interested readers may follow the links to those threads and read them independently.