UK Caravelle?
 

With Flight International featuring the Caravelle at the moment, I was wondering if any UK airline came close to buying it.

Anyone know anything?

There is a mention in the history of a ferry the Kent based charter company in the 60s from manston Kent that they where interested in the caravelle and also the comet before they where folded up by BUA a very interesting book and read

Sorry that should be air ferry?

Air Ferry...........even !!!!

Or Airy Fairy even.
I flew on a couple of these in the 1980s between Damascus and Bahrain (Syrian Airlines). They were never full. And, working with/for government organisations, I was always sat next to a sky marshal. The Syrians thought I would feel somehow safer being sat in close proximity to the man with the gun. I invariably made my excuses after take off and found a more isolated seat!

Not UK, but nearby, Aer Lingus seemingly wanted the Caravelle but their government of the day wouldn't have it...so 4 x BAC1-11's instead

Though not many airlines got 25+ years from their Avon Caravelles. :O

Agreed, Dave
Probably worked out OK for them in the end
(from an unashamedly huge fan of the 1-11)

'ZG

By the end of the 1960's BAC were no longer treating the Caravelle as a competitor

Looks as if the answer is "not really". I wonder if any French airlines thought of acquiring the Trident or 1-11.

There's at least one book on the history of the Caravelle and who bought it and who thought about buying it.

I'd wager back then that politics would have been the 'captain at the wheel' in regards to purchasing aircraft, especially considering the thriving home based industries on both sides of the channel. Maybe there were aircraft purchased from the 'enemy' but I can't think of any ? The airlines most likely would have, if left to their own devices.

Air France did buy and operate Viscounts, although I'm not too sure the French themselves had a directly comparable aircraft available....

Before the Caravelles came along, a route like Paris/London would be operated mainly by DC-4s and the odd Connie.

Plus the occasional Breguet Provence, in the days before most of them were converted to freighters (which were subsequently a fairly common sight at LHR):

http://abpic.co.uk/pictures/full_siz...746-medium.jpg

c52:
"I wonder if any French airlines thought of acquiring the Trident or 1-11"


Air Inter thought about acquiring the One-Eleven, but that's as far as it went. "Fancy some more RR engines Alphonse?"

Alphonse is a German name!

Air france Viscounts were regulars into LHR and AF operated V700s for about 15 years according to another site, It also said they ordered 12 which was quite decent number for the time and indeed the viscount at LHR was very much the A319/320 of its dayas the dominant type at Heathrow.

However AF were great for spotters because they threw in all kinds of things as the earleir poster suggested on freight trips and flights to places like Marseilles , DC4s Connies, the wonderful Deux Pont, which it is often alleged only got to 5000ft by the coast , even DC3s and several of these survived into the Caravelle /707 320 era too.

"Alphonse is a German name"
Are you sure you're not thinking of Adolf ?

Many years ago I had the good fortune to have a trip round Alidair at East Midlands (Castle Donnington). In their hangar was a scale model ( travel agent size ) of a Caravelle 11R ( I think - the cargo convertible one) in full Alidair Cargo colour scheme. The guy on escort told me they were considering ex Iberia aircraft at the time.
Never did find out what went wrong.
I wish someone could photoshop one for me, as photography was not permitted inside the hangar.
Hope it helps
Be lucky
Dave

I have two on my shelf
"Sud Est Caravelle" By A. Avrane, M. Gilliand and J. GUillem ISBN 0 7106 0044 5
and the mighty tome
"Caravelle The Complete Story" by John Wegg ISBN 0 9653993 1 0 Does exactly what it says on the cover.
I think second hand is anyone's best hope nowadays
Hope it helps,
Be lucky
David

John Wegg's book is generally considered to be the definitive book on the Caravelle.

Abiding last memory of the Caravelle should have been late night at Glasgow in 1981 trying to sleep before early holiday flight and being woken by astonishing roar that not even triple glazing could keep out - source unknown. Actual last memory was a 1st anniversary trip a year later in September 1982 to Paris from Glasgow and discovering that the aforementioned roar from the year before was an Air Toulouse Super 10 that was our transport to Beauvais and back. Have some phots somewhere. First and only Caravelle flights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mknbL9IsHI

It's even got it's own song!!!!

The first production batch of Viscounts were divided equally between BEA and Air France, odd construction numbers to BEA, even numbers to AF. The AF ones held the Paris to London route down until the arrival of the Caravelle, later supplemented by spare L-1049 Constellations on occasion.

My own last Caravelle sighting was about 1992. I was in Berlin, post-wall coming down, and had seen previously that one was still scheduled with Syrian Arab on a once-weekly Saturday Copenhagen-Berlin-Damascus run, which seemed a bit unlikely. Forgot about it, was out on the Saturday on the local S-Bahn train which passes some miles to the north of Schonefeld airport, and there it came by absolute coincidence, just gliding down finals into the field. And I did run across in the train from left to right to watch it disappear. Last one.

Sad isn't it? I can't recall the last time I saw a Caravelle in the air. A beautiful piece of kit...

First jet I ever landed in the cockpit. Still remember the gauloise stuck to the lower lip of the flight engineer as we touched down. It may have been loud outside, deafening even as you walked up the tail air stair, but there was just a muted hum inside. The French have built some beautiful looking aircraft as well as some real shockers.

Of course you were really sitting in a Comet nose. :O

A lot of the Caravelle came from the UK. The Rolls-Royce engines, of course, and the design of the nose and flight deck was by De Havilland (and the early noses were actually built at Hatfield), which is why it looks like a Comet (unkind suggestions that the noses of grounded Comet 1s had been cut off and sent to Toulouse :) ). A lot of the systems stuff as well, there wasn't a great French aerospace supply industry in the 1950s.

One bit of caravelle trivia was the french fitting one out with cameras and in clear weather on trips eastwards straying off the airways to snap pictures of interesting features.....nothing the other side did not do of course. I think Paris Match (of all unlikely mags) might even have run an article on this (much later of course). The other unlikely fact I remember was Sterling (in jet vicar days) using them on transatlantic passenger flights, probably via Iceland (so I suppose not that different from Wow today). Either way I have always had a soft spot for the caravelle.

They went to Florida if my memory serves me correctly, with multiple stops en route. I believe that in addition to Iceland, they stopped in either Bangor or Gander, and at least once again on the way to the sunshine state.

I'm sure someone out there had log books or planning documents confirming the routings.

I found it interesting that the Swedish Air Force used the Caravelle as an Elint platform but the French never did. AFAIK

YS

We had an extensive discussion about Sterling's transatlantic Caravelle operations over on Flyertalk.

Favoured destinations in the late 1960s-1970s included Santo Domingo, Orlando, and San Francisco/Los Angeles. The latter were a real haul and typically routed from Copenhagen via Keflavik, Bangor and Omaha. It was the more advanced P&W-engine Caravelles used, of course. Notably, Omaha was as far west as United Caravelles were scheduled, and thus had licensed ground engineers, while SFO, although well removed from those eastern Caravelle schedules, was their main maintenance base, they would ferry to and fro.

Other Sterling ultra-long haul Caravelle holiday charters were to Toronto, Bangkok and Natal in Brazil. One of the Bangkok flights crashed into high ground approaching a Dubai refuelling stop one night.

The P&W engine aircraft also had a feature that most of the RR aircraft did not, namely a drop-down supplementary oxygen system. The Caravelle originally did not, but when the fleet of 20 was sold to United the FAA flat refused to give a jet a certificate without it. Hitherto they had relied on keeping under 30,000, a few portable sets with flight attendants, and a crew making an instant emergency descent if there was a decompression at altitude. I presume the Air France F- registered Caravelles that operated from the Caribbean into Miami at the time, or likewise the South American operators, were somehow accepted. I wonder what the UK CAA would have made of it if offered for a UK certificate. It never was.

I think that they went from a propeller platform straight to the DC-8 that they kept up until relatively recently. The Douglas aircraft had more space and endurance so Sud Aviation lost a customer. There's one in the Musee de L'Air at Le Bourget.

I remember a couple of them at Glasgow in '72. They belonged to a subsidiary of Air France.(Air Inter?)
Landed on 06 and both streamed their brake chutes; they then taxied in one behind the other with the brake chutes still attached and waving about in the jet efflux until they parked!!

"Air Charter International" as I recall.

Kind of 'Air France Airtours' if you will..

'ZG

I used to fly on a Caravelle regularly between 1977 and 1978 from Heathrow to Luxembourg with Luxair. I remember it being quite quiet inside. The cabin crew complained that they did not have any control of the temperature in the passenger cabin and were always asking the flight crew to turn it up or down. Correct me if I am wrong but I think it was the first of the tail mounted jets. I remember the 1967 Caravelle flight belonging to Iberia that crashed while going into Heathrow. The bodies were all buried at Brookwood cemetery.

One of the victims was the actress June Thorburn, who had a part in 'The Cruel Sea'

You know I had a teenage crush on her, never knew she died in an air crash, she just seemed to disappear from movies

They were regulars at Edinburgh as well at the time, notably on gloomy winter days when France were playing Scotland at Rugby, up to three of them would be parked opposite where the old terminal used to be, two from Orly and one from some provincial point. In the summer they used to do student charter flights on the same routes.