Britannia did a series of flights to KLAX from Luton with the B707, tech stopping outbound, but often coming back direct. Often we would not get FPL, the first we knew is when given an estimate by London.

Fascinating stuff and such a brief period of operation for the Britannia 707s. Did BY employ their own Flight Engineers or simply place a third pilot in the F/E seat ?

As a bit of an aside the purchase of "C" series turbofanned 70s was a I think a smart move at the time when many competitors (British Midland, Donaldson, Dan Air and LLoyd) had bought turbojet 321s readily and more cheaply available from Pan Am. They would have pretty useless for West Coast USA- were gas guzzlers come 1973 - and as perhaps an aside poor for any kind of ops out of Luton except perhaps the Med, I remember BD's 'YBJ taking until the Delta/26 intersection to get airborne going just to Palma.

No- they had FEs I think- not sure where they came from They had them on the Brits of course.

yes only Caledonian AW previously had the sense to buy new or almost new 707-320C's in 1967
- bit of a hoo hah with HMRC over the import tax duty on these but they got away with it - they operated 7 until the merger with BUA
(2 were brand new and built for Caledonian AW -399C)

G-AYEX being one of the 7 - returned to BCAL after the BY lease
G-AYSI also went to BCAL after BY

British eagle had also ordered 2 new 320C's for 1968 but were not really operated and one was never delivered - they had a tax issue iirc and one was re-regd in Bermuda or bahamas
one of this pair went to Transavia then to Caledonian AW G-ATZC
the other to MEA then to BOAC G-ATZD

Lloyd did have one 320C for a while - G-AZJM (to BCAL)

AZJM flew this one with British Midland a few times 1980 on the PIA contract.

Oh the good old days. There was a door on the north side of Hanger 89 which was adjacent to the spectators enclosure by the terminal. I can't remember whether it had a handle on the outside or whether we had to wait for an engineer to come out to have a peek.

hard to imagine these days- eventually it got a keypad I think.

I can remember peeking in at G-AYSI in spring '71. It was the first to feature the then new livery-couldn't work out at first why it had red on it.

There was a door on the other side as well, overlooking the taxiway albeit with an 8ft high wooden fence. The week following the delivery of G-AYSI, myself and a school friend, noticing the door was ajar, ventured down the access road to peer into the hangar hoping to get a view of the 707. We met an engineer coming out, so, expected to be told "clear off" (or something similar), we turned away only to be invited in by the engineer and given a tour of the newly arrived 707, in which he obviously took great pride. One of those unforgettable memories from the days before high security, health & safety etc.

I believe Britannia also used Invictas Boeing 720 as a back up aircraft Remember seeing this at Palma around 74 .All thomsons guest being loaded on this .

Invicta did a lot of ad-hoc work, picking up flights on behalf of others rather like Titan today. A I have mentioned before quite a bit passed to them after Court Lline went bust- Court Line flew for Jetway, Pontins, Warners etc. as well as in house Horizon and Clarksons at the end.

Passengers who had booked expecting a nice new One Eleven thus ended up with the dulcet tones of four Rolls Royce Tynes for three hours down to Alicante on a Vanguard in September '74.

One of the Britannia ex B707 F/Engs was Dave Brown who ran the ground school on the B737 and B757/767.

He was loaned out to British Midland on a wet lease to Kuwait in late 70's.

Sadly died recently

As for Pilots on the panel of a B707 God help us it never happened as all the F/Engs I flew with were ex ground engineers who knew every bit of the aircraft backwards.

With regards to invicta using the vanguard to Alicante .Flybe have been using the Dash down to Alicante recently and I know last year saw it in August I regularly fly many times to Alicante I bet the customers had a nice surprise.Saying that Cross air use to fly the Saab 340 in to Alicante from Zurich.

F/Es? Navigators too, especially to LAX. No INS in those 707s I’m sure.

One of Dave Brown's BM B707 stories was how his lunch was spoiled one day when a hijacker (one of six on board) burst into the flight deck toting a gun. The bad guys forced the a/c to land in Damascus but eventually surrendered to the Syrian authorities and the incident was resolved with no loss of life.

Dave said the most worrying aspect was when the hijackers checked passports and separated Jewish passengers from the others. One of the bad guys looked at Dave's passport and commented that David was a Jewish name. Dave said he was prepared if necessary to demonstrate anatomically by removal of clothing that this was not the case.

Brit 707s did do charters to Singapore and Hong Kong. I have proof on Luton Airport movement sheets from that era as well as the other destinations previously mentioned.

yes i recall those too - were they for far east travel centre or also MOD flights?

Some more Luton history from 1970 in this UK AIP AGA extract.

Interesting. Presumably after 08 departures southwest bound were routed cross radial 39 Bovingdon 3000 feet or below.

Before this they had been routed Brookmans Park, Kilburn, Epsom and Dunsfold.

There was also Brookmans Park, Detling, Cranbrook and Hastings.

Can't remember when these went.

Also like the crossing the M1 motorway bit- how does that work in IFR- time at given speed? Was replaced by DME 9 from Bovingdon I think at some stage.

Never got my head around why runway 26 had then and still has a displaced threshold when the runway is on top of a hill, which just happened to be the size of the turning circle.

Bovingdon was an NDB in those days, becoming a VOR when Garston was decommissioned in the 1970s.

Not sure how these min noise routings tied in with the SIDs.

Edit: according to the AIP there were no SIDs in effect for LTN in 1969.