BOAC in europe

[wayoutwest]

hi all.BOAC use to stop at places like frankfurt zurich and rome i can understand in the prop era but once the jets arrived why did they still make these calls.did they pick up and set down passengers and then one has to ask if they competed with BEA.:ok:

[wayoutwest]

sorry my mouse stuttered

[Airclues]

In the 70's, the UK government controlled the traffic rights into Hong Kong. The European airlines that wanted to fly into Hong Kong had to offer something in exchange and therefore BOAC was allowed to pick up passengers from certain European airports to the Far East and Africa.
When Cathay Pacific applied to operate to Europe, the UK government naturally gave them the rights instead of BA.

Dave

[renfrew]

At one time these stops did generate valuable longhaul traffic but were probably uneconomic once the 747 arrived and passengers expected nonstop flights to everywhere.
BOAC did compete with BEA on these European routes but the passenger numbers would have been modest ex-UK.
As an aside BOAC and BEA barely spoke to each other in these days.

[Planemike]

sorry my mouse stuttered


Seems there is a problem with your keyboard too !!!!

Planemike

[Airclues]

BOAC and BEA barely spoke to each other in these days

http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc193/Airclues/DSC04590.jpg

Dave

[wayoutwest]

hi.thanks for the replys.i couldnt understand why a long range jet needed to stop so close to the uk.from what AIRCLUES said about boac and bea not talking it would have been very interesting when they had to form BA that must be a story in its self. mike.

[Tagron]

I believe the history of the stops at (e.g) FCO, ZRH and FRA dated back way before the 70s. BOAC would have been the designated carrier for the British colonies and as such would presumably have had traffic rights between these countries and European destinations. Once the colonies achieved independence those rights would gradually have been extinguished in favour of the new national carriers. The availability of longer range aircraft and changing customer perceptions would have reduced the attractiveness of these stops too.

There were some new BOAC/BA routes in the 70s that might have been the result of negotiations over HKG rights: Seychelles via Orly, and Tehran via Dusseldorf come to mind. Then in the mid-eighties Munich was part of the through running MAN-MUC-DXB-BKK-HKG.

As for BEA/BOAC rivalry, both companies at one time competed directly on LHR-TLV with night-stopping aircraft leaving TLV within 30 minutes of each other. The whole history of the BEA/BOAC merger looks like a classic case of modern industrial tribalism - it must have taken ten years to get the two companies properly together. But enough said on that topic:oh:

[tristar 500]

Tagron said "it must have taken ten years to get the two companies properly together"

Ten years??!! It`s still us & them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BEA & proud.

tristar 500

[Airclues]

It`s still us & them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It may be for you Tristar 500, but the people in the present BA have no time for, or interest in, the old childish rivalries, they have much more important issues to worry about.

The ticket in my photo belonged to my then girlfriend, who was a BEA stewardess. In 1971 I took her on a trip on my BOAC VC10, hence the BOAC baggage tag. We've been married for 38 years so BEA/BOAC relations can't have been that bad.

Dave

[D120A]

I was lucky enough to fly LHR-HKG in a BOAC 707 in July 1964. The first three stops were Frankfurt, Rome and Beirut. It was noticeable that the aircraft departed LHR half full and people got on board at FRA to go to New Delhi, Bangkok and HKG. Similarly, people from LHR left at Rome, Beirut and other interim stops. I think only a dozen of us went the whole route, and even then (as the aircraft went on to Tokyo) you could say we left the service early too.

Quite simply, at a time when the return fare to HKG was £416, and a junior RAF officer's pay in those days was less that £1000 (so heaven knows what the average wage was), it is hardly surprising that demand for long range travel was so low that aircraft had to stop to pick up passengers to make any economic sense of providing a service at all. European airlines other than BOAC could be seen at Kai Tak only once or twice a week so, for example, if you were German and you needed to be in HKG on a Tuesday, you would fly BOAC if Lufthansa's one and only weekly schedule was three days adrift from your requirement.

Every day, the front page of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong used to publish, in a little panel on the paper's front page, a list of the day's international arrivals at Kai Tak. There were no more than a dozen aircraft on each day. There were more ships arriving in the harbour!

Returning HKG-LHR in late September, our VC-10 had to overfly a scheduled stop (Zurich) because of fog. I recall Captain Eagleton coming back to apologise personally to the one passenger affected. That gives you an idea of the then daily passenger traffic demand from HKG (plus Rangoon, New Delhi, Karachi and Cairo) to Zurich, even with the pull of an airline offering the brand new (and much celebrated) VC-10.

It was different in those days.

[Golf Charlie Charlie]

For what it is worth, I flew on a British Airways 747-200 Heathrow to Nairobi with a stop in Frankfurt as late as 1977.

[WHBM]

BA intercontinental 747s were still making stops in Europe into the 1980s.

Frankfurt, Zurich and Rome were the points they had always used since the late 1940s, plus into the mid 1960s Dusseldorf as well. The stops were on both Asian and African services, and ran down over a long time. They were low frequency, rarely more than once a day.

This is how long haul flights were done at the time, if you took Qantas from London to Sydney on a Saturday in 1971 the 707 would start off by stopping at Amsterdam, Athens and Tehran. Now a 707 could easily get London to Tehran nonstop, but these stops were how it had always been done, and were commercially (and sometimes politically) significant. The same was true back in prop aircraft days - the BOAC fleet could always get nonstop to the Eastern Mediterranean direct if desired, and there were always some flights in the schedule which did so.

They also provided flights from European cities to points like Hong Kong, where BOAC were the long haul operator (Cathay Pacific were a smaller regional company before 1980). In fact BOAC operated flights from Hong Kong through Tokyo to the USA, and across the Indian Ocean to Johannesburg, well into 747 times.

For colonial passengers going to/from the UK, the various intermediate points were useful as stopovers for a couple of days, Rome in particular; in those days such stops were not charged extra.

[G&T ice n slice]

There are two separate issues involved with BOAC operations via European points

(1) is 'cabotage'
(2) is the fact that the German surrender for WWII did not permit them to own or operate aircraft. So all commercial services had to be by foreign carriers.

Under 'cabotage' services to 'empire' destinations could only be served by the national carrier of the non-empire country & the national carrier of the 'empire' country, in other words BOAC. Gradually BOAC set up 'local' national carriers, such as EAAC, WAAC, CAAC, and (via BSAA BWIA) and a host of others.
As these empire countries were granted independence these subsidiaries were handed over to the new governments.

BOAC continued to operate 'via Europe' services on the back of their 'legacy' rights.

The 'Germany' situation continues to allow many carriers to operate 'via Germany' services even today, although mostly no-one bothers, preferring a hub-and-spoke on their own home base. In fact the BA freighters (is it GSS these days?) were still operating via Germany to USA & Canada points using these 'legacy' rights (although now operating, I think, under the "one skies" European Union ticket.)

Rights for all carriers into HKG was for a long time (in theory until handover) under the control of the UK CAA and (notionally) BOAC/BA were the 'national' carrier until the concept of the "national carier" was eroded. (Hence CX into Europe).

I Think about the only remaining 'Cabotage' point is now Bermuda, and in theory BA could set up a hub in Bermuda to serve any points in USA/Canada and link these direct Bermuda-Europe.

Boring aren't I, and probably rongg

[Tagron]

Reading #11 by D120A I am reminded that during the VC10 era BOAC management became concerned at the number of occasions on which inbound flights were missing out the scheduled European stop and proceeding directly to LHR, with the resulting impact on reputation for reliability and perhaps implications on traffic rights.

Early in my career I was the junior P3 on one such VC10 flight. The planned schedule was BAH-DAM-ZRH-LHR starting in the early hours of the morning. The very senior captain decided on the pretext of the ZRH weather received shortly before TOD to omit the ZRH stop. The actual weather was well above limits, though it was not a pleasant morning. I do not recall how many passengers were involved - probably very few, but their considerations did not appear part of the decision making process.

I gained the impression there was a general feeling among the crews that these European stops had become a waste of time and interfered with the primary objective of getting the crew home quickly after an overnight sector.:hmm:

[Peter47]

G&T is right about Bermuda. In the 70s BA operated a daily 747 between JFK & BDA & less frequent 707s to Barbados. Other European carriers operated from JFK to their colonies or ex colonies in the Carribean.

It is interesting to look at 1970s timetables. Long haul flights had far more intermediate stops than you you would get these days. Swissair operated a substantial programme via Athens. PA & TWA operated Rome - Lisbon - JFK (and generally a few other stopovers). Indeed SR operated a flight to JFK via LIS. TWA had a large number of intra European sectors even if the final destination was also served non-stop.

I think that it was a combination of a legacy from days when aircraft had a very limited range, an unwillingness to give up routes (flying was very much a matter of national prestige and it took things like the fuel crises of 1974 & 1979 to change things), and a lack of adequate point to point traffic.

I do seem to remember that BOAC had its own ticket office in cities such as ZRH rather than use the BEA one doubtless a matter of prestige.

[thegypsy]

Around 1970 I took a Pan Am B747 flight from Heathrow to Beirut which was going via Frankfurt and Istanbul. I seem to recall it was their round the world flight.

After spending god knows how many hours on the ground at Frankfurt because they could not close one of the cargo hold doors we bypassed Athens as crew would have been out of hours much to the horror of Israeli pax who were due to disembark at Istanbul.

Guess BOAC did similar flights too.

[Opssys]

Weren't some of the BOAC European stops designated Flagstops (No Pax/Cargo Upload/Offload and were not Tech Stops as no fuel uplift/crew change required)?

Although I never worked for either BEA, or BOAC the poor relationship between the two carriers both before end after their merger had a direct impact on me (BUA/BCAL) five times - Three worked in my favour and twice it didn't. I found it all a bit sad. But when BA took over BCAL, I was told some apparently strange decisions were to ensure that another BEA/BOAC long term situation didn't happen again.