FED:
I like the photographs; it's quite remarkable that, between us, we have come up with photographs of the beginning and the end of an exercise that took place over half-a-century ago. Indeed, it is even the same Belfast, XR369 "Spartacus". I am unlikely to be in your photograph since in 1966 I was still flying Argosys around the Middle East (with ICM).
In fact, the clever sods among you will have already noticed that XR369 has the old Belslow back end (where everything came to a neat taper). Sadly, this design resulted in the aircraft being about 11% down on designed performance so Shorts had to go back to the drawing board and find a solution.
The entire arse end was redesigned and that just about solved the problem. We called them Fastbacks and by the time I got there in 1972, I think they had all been modified.
I'll try and do a bit on the Salalah ACR 7 tomorrow.
Danny, I've just raised a glass to you.