Darwin on 707 freighters was either your dream or your nightmare:eek:

The next flight often over flew as there was no freight or no need to fuel or change crew.

One steward actually got a job in the bar in the Fanny Bay hotel as he had been stuck there for so long:ok:

Private jet - Pls. see your P.M.s

I can remember the 707s crew training at Bedford Thurleigh around 1972-4 sometimes on a Saturday when the military had stopped flying. Did you carry a steward/stewardess to look after refreshments/snacks ?

No. One of the trainees would make the tea (not easy during 'circuits and bumps'). I did several base training details at Bedford, although in a VC10 rather than a 707.

Never went to Bedford, but ......... tea and bikkies on a Base Training detail ??

There's posh for you.

What of the 707 freighters that used to operate the route? I guess the crews got some real time off in SYD/MEL. Also what were the schedules for the operation?

I had a school mate who went to Hamble and was flying 707s afterwards. He told me of waking up over the Indian Ocean somewhere and discovering the rest of the crew were asleep.

Did that happen very often?

1971 BOAC 707 (and a few others) freighter schedules :

http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...71/ba71-51.jpg

http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...71/ba71-52.jpg

Bear in mind that the freighter timetables were much more theoretical than passenger. Stops were omitted if no commercial load (as described above), extra stops were added if there was something, etc.

Notable are the 3 am departures from Heathrow to New York. Night slots are now far more valuable for early morning arrivals than freighter departures.

"India Four Two

I had a school mate who went to Hamble and was flying 707s afterwards. He told me of waking up over the Indian Ocean somewhere and discovering the rest of the crew were asleep.

Did that happen very often?"


See my post no 93

Well not over the Indian Ocean anyway, as P2 would be trying to find someone, anyone, he could understand to talk to on HF, and P3N would be trying to find out where the heck they were......

Too true !

"Bombay, Bombay this is Delhi - shut up, Bombay !"

Flew with one of our WW II Polish Captains into Teheran from Karachi, and after a long and fruitless attempt to raise Teheran on HF I threw my headset off in disgust and made some racist, and politically incorrect remark about the provenance of Teheran ATC control.

The Captain just smiled and picked up the mic. and proceeded to call Teheran in the almost incomprehensible fractured English / Polish accent that he still spoke.

Teheran answered him immediately. You bugger, I said, and he just smiled and replied - it's the way you hold your mouth my friend ".

Duncan Sinclair.
 

As a very young S/O he gave me a very valuable piece of advice which I carried through to the end of my career - "Never trust an engineer in a suit". Typical Scots golfer - played off 2 and hated to lose which he seldom did.

As I understand it the first true high-latitude flights were by SAS with a DC-7C in the mid-1950s, operating Copenhagen-Anchorage-Tokyo, A 1957 timetable here (right hand side, table 2), which actually gives a timetable time for crossing the Pole.

http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...57/sk57-03.jpg


I also believe that the principal issue for them to crack in high latitude flying in Spring and Autumn was the extended period of Polar Twilight, when the sun has dipped just below the horizon and so not directly visible to the sextant, but the sky is still sufficiently bright that the stars cannot be seen. I believe a sextant manufacturer of the era came up with an instrument that handled this, perhaps our very knowledgeable onetime navigators can explain this.

I've also wondered how you got on with Astral navigation if you were in 8/8 cloud for a sustained period. That DC-7C rumbling along at probably 25,000 feet was probably even worse than a jet for this.

and also the Britannia, answer is - not a lot, see post 43. On that occasion the Loran was available until crossing the coast, after that no Loran, no Astro, no NDB's. After that just maintain a good AirPlot and hope that the forcast winds were accurate. ( no other means of measuring groundspeed at that time. INS ? GPS? just a gleam in someone's eyes, maybe.)

Your point is well taken. When I wrote my comments I was thinking of something along the lines of EGLL to KSFO/KLAX and maybe even KSEA westbound.


Wonder how many times SAS made the Tokyo trip non-stop back in those days as opposed to a pre planned technical stop in Anchorage?


As I recall TWA avoided the higher latitudes (Doppler/Loran only), so as to eliminate the need for grid navigation where as Pan Am who operated with Nav/2nd Officers did operate at the higher latitudes. Don't bet your last dollar on my memory.

BOAC West Coast USA 1962
 

Can anyone provide any facts on the BOAC Boeing 707-436 services from
Heathrow to Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1962/63 ?

The published timetable shows these operating westbound via an unspecified technical stop, but non-stop eastbound. The scheduled elapsed time westbound is given as 13hrs00mins hours to LAX and 14hrs05mins to SFO,
which seems strange ?

I understand the tech stop on the westbound Los Angeles flight was at Winnipeg. The San Francisco flight made a commercial stop at New York. I don't know whether there was a crew change at Winnipeg, in which case they would have to go there, or if the crew worked through and they would stop wherever was best on the day. The eastbound does appear to be nonstop as the flight time is pretty much what it is today (ending with a 50-minute connection onto another BOAC flight on to Frankfurt and beyond !)

http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...62/ba62-06.jpg

http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...62/ba62-08.jpg

I've done a lot of London to California flying over time, I notice that the westbounds tend to go much further north than the eastbounds. I've been over Baffin Island and Calgary going west to LA, whereas the last time I returned from San Francisco we routed overhead Montreal.

Some of the trips in the late 1970s were on the Air New Zealand DC-10 that BA used to hire each day ( I believe the daily hire was actually of 1.25 aircraft as the plane to London set off from LAX a few hours before the inbound one arrived), and it was marginal for the aircraft westbound, if necessary the flight made a refuelling stop at Prestwick, which necessitated anticipating this the day before and sending a slip crew up there. When American Airlines took over from TWA about 1990 they used to put up a decidedly hand-drawn and annoted chart on the forward cabin wall showing the proposed track, which had all the hallmarks of having been carefully written out by the most junior member of ops, with ruler and sharp pencils.

Any of you old crews remember a VOR on this route in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming called "Crazy Woman", which in the days before political correctness and before passengers got upset if their beloved movie was interrupted, was regularly announced and commented on by the BA crew ?

Crazy Woman Creek - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I didn't think BOAC went to LA before the days of the 336s and then I didnt think they did non stop . Bangor Maine was favourite tech stop in those days but I do not know if BOAC went there . I had a close friend at the time who was 436 crew and don't recall him going to LA ,

I thought the only LA flight was the Australia the wrong way round VC10 which went LHR-JFK-LAX .
True LA non stop service only began with the shared Air NZ DC10 much later on.

The downside of Bangor westbound is the US requirement that any flight entering the US has to clear customs/immigration at the first stop, which means you have to get everyone and their bags off, everyone through all the procedures, through security again, and back on. I believe passengers would also lose any duty free drinks from Heathrow at the security recheck. For a scheduled operation it probably adds one to two hours to the trip, and quite possibly knocks the crew out of hours on longer runs.

It can suit some charter operators going to smaller points in Florida, but for mainstream schedules US tech stops are to be avoided. Must improve Gander's business considerably.

Re westbound Lhr - Lax.

If I remember the 707-336 used to tech stop Wiinnepeg - it was always tech stopped as I recall and I think the crew changed.

It never tech stopped eastbound.

I was on the ANZ DC10, as a copilot, and we never, to my knowledge, tech stopped - the aircraft had sufficient range and en-route reflight planning was used to reduce reserve requirements if neccessary.

Sometimes payload would be restricted if there was a weight problem.

We often had a bowser standing by for a last minute top up if there were no shows.

As the sector was quite long there was an arrangement whereby the flight crew were given Lhr hotel accomodation for the two nights before the flight.

This allowed for an arrangement whereby "tomorrow's crew" could cover the standby requirement if there was a delay or the aircraft returned.

Westbound flights were generally further north than eastbound flights as the prevailing wind is usually westerly and the further north you go the wind tends to get weaker against you.

The furthest north I can remember going was overhead Clyde River on the east coast of Canada but flights may have gone to higher latitudes - we often routed north of Iceland.

In the winter eastbound there could sometimes be a problem with the fuel tank temperature and the flight engineer would move it around the tanks, to make it do work, to warm it up.

Failing that a descent of 4000ft would be required to a lower (warmer)altitude.

This was not a problem westbound as the fuel in tanks at the higher latitudes was considerably greater (and therefore took longer to cool) than eastbound.

I think from Lax we also got special high density fuel (not available at Lhr?) which had a higher freeze point.

I think the ANZ tie up came about because the 747-136 (P&W engines) did not have the range.

When the 747-236 (RR engines) came along that could go direct and the DC10 was only swapped twice per week.

The ANZ DC10 was then used to do a mix of Lhr - Bos - Phl, Lhr - Ymx, Lhr-Mia on the intervening days.

There were about 17 crews on the DC10 so it was quite a friendly existence.

As a late 20year old, the 3months posting to Auckland, for the conversion, was one of the major highlights of my career - New Zealand men wanted to go do their own things at the weekend and left behind lots of lovely young ladies!!