I don't recall seeing any 05R landings during the various spells I had working in the CTA in the mid-70s, so they certainly weren't as common as those on 23L. That's hardly surprising given the relative frequency of strong NE vs SW winds in this part of the world.

Interestingly, the extract below from a July 1968 Aerad chart shows 15R/33L as having recently closed (for the construction of T3 Pier 7 for the 747), but 05L/23R still available. At that point, the latter would have been by far the shortest (and narrowest) of Heathrow's runways (6255' x 250') and I don't think it survived much longer, as by then it was constraining any extension of T3 Pier 5. The current control tower also stands on the old 05L/23R footprint.


https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....e368c0e9c2.jpg

The elevations are interesting, it really is as near as dammit flat! Bit mountainous in the NW corner... :p

I recall seeing a few landings on 23 over the years (including a BA 747 with some alarming looking flames while reverse thrust was deployed) but never anything on 05 - but maybe I avoided going to Heathrow when a spending a few hours on the roof of the Queen's Building/T2 would have been in a chilly NE wind!

Im a bit late to the party - used to travel to LHR as a teenager in the 70s - the 140 bus of course! Hanging out of the front windows and unscrewing the light bulbs......
Sometimes also used to bike from South Harrow with mates and spent time riding around the perimiter road - one spectacular sight was a whole line up of 747 waiting to depart the then 10R - BA-AC-AI-PA-TW - I wish Id had a camera handy!!
Later in life actually worked there for various foreign airlines - I remember one stormy night 05R was being used (late 80s??) and the captain on the flight I was handling kept asking if he could use 10R but was out of crosswind limits - he didnt look too pleased about 05R - but departed all the same!

I thought landing on 05R were stopped by early 1981, because of the starting of the building of Terminal 4, with any 05R landings being far too close to the works and site boundary of the new T4..?
I started on the T4 site in April '81 and there were no 05R landings in my time on site there between then and 1984 when I left.

That's entirely possible.

Never having seen any means that I have no idea when they stopped. :O

DaveReidUK reported:

Well yes, I think we've established that the last movement on 05R was probably some years prior to the last movement on 23L.

Same bit of concrete, different direction. :O

05R
BA 747 landing March 1977

pic credit. Kjell Nilsson

Last time I recall flying off 05R was in one of our F27's (BMA) in howling NNE winds/sleet/blizzard and the Tower told the skipper to STOP during a very slow T/O roll.
We had plenty of runway left to start again.
The conflict was one landing on 10R and another 3 miles behind him.

I cannot ever recalling landing on 05R but may have done when I was a boy with British Eagle in a Britannia.


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....2dfcc73358.jpg

Next challenge - find a photo of any movement on 05L or 23R ! :O

Rog 747. As I mentioned in an earlier post we came back from Faro our honeymoon on I think March 27 1977 and landed on 05R. Nut your pic could have been taken a few days earlier because I think UK was in the grip of biting strong NE winds and snow for a few days that month.

Threshold shots would have been hard as not much public space around the 05 threshold only roads or rivers and it would have been bloody cold that week as well.

I seem to remember that 05s had very inferior approach lights on wooden poles

PB

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....5f3e4abe59.jpg
The Master Robert on the then A30 was mentioned earlier. It can be seen in the background of this photo from late 1967. At the time the walls and ceiling of the Pit and Paddock bar carried signatures and comments from many of the then current F1 and Sports car racing drivers. All that was lost in a later re-decoration. The photo is taken across the road at the Ace of Spades service station and is the day after the cancellation of the 1967 RAC Rally of Great Britain due to a Foot and Mouth disease outbreak. It shows Lars Helmer, co-driver of later world rally champion Bjorn Waldegard with a Porsche 911 of the Swedish Scania Vabis team (who taught the Porsche factory how to prepare cars for rough forest rallies). Next to VHS Supplies across the road who were also mentioned was later the site of Automania Accessories who sponsored my own first International rally entries.

The Ace of Spades service station is also now long gone as well.

You can still see the remains of the low level white brick wall which bordered the footpath and where the entrance's crossed the footpaths, and there are two big advertising hoardings on the waste ground of where the service station used to be now.

The office I described on the A4 at Cranford, Heathrow House, was a nightmare to get taxis to from a Heathrow terminal, where they had been ranked up for an hour or two anticipating a job to The City at least. It was next door to another hotel, the Berkeley Arms, which has also been demolished and a Doubletree built on the site. But if you asked the taxi driver for the hotel instead, which didn't have its own shuttle bus, they knew they could be given a ticket by the doorman which allowed them back to the head of the taxi queue at the airport. Driver still grumbled though.

Probably early 1980s, when standby transatlantic tickets had their time, the company there, based in Detroit, had a miserly US managing director Mr X who wrote around that travel to the US, which there was quite a lot of, should henceforth be by standby, "as it's cheapest and in my experience there are always seats". What a pain to have to go to the airport twice, once when the ticket office opened and once for the afternoon flight. Said MD was also provided with a Daimler and chauffeur - the classic sort of such driver, had the job for years and seen all the top management come and go. One morning the manager of the Newcastle office had come down on the first BA domestic to a meeting, and was walking out of Terminal 1 when he sees said chauffeur standing in the ticket counter queue. So he goes up to him. "Hello, what are you dong here". "Oh, Mr X is going to Detroit this afternoon so I've to come over for his standby ticket. Hang on a minute and I'll give you a lift back to the office ".

It's surprising that over the decades Heathrow never sorted out short distance taxi journeys from the terminals.

I was just looking at the historical imagery on GE. Here's one from 2004, where 23L is still marked as an active runway, but must only be used as a taxiway, due to the proximity of the parked Concorde. The runway number and the TDZ markings survived until 2006, but no X markings were applied.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....ad7628c5b8.png

When NATS moved out of the CTB in the Central Area, units like AIS moved to a 'Heathrow House' on the A4 as did the admin/personnel offices from Sibson Court. Unfortunately this also meant their medical branch at the CTB also moved so my annual visit to Heathrow for my ATCO medical (parked my car in Woking and got the coach from the railway station to the Central Area which stopped right outside the medical centre) had to be done elsewhere; nice little money spinner for NATS it used to be as many airline pilots would get their medicals done there too.
I presume this is the same Heathrow House as the one mentioned above, however I thnk all these units have now moved to Whiteley, Hants.

Yes, I think Heathrow House (still there) had worked through a few tenants, including BA, as I recall a continuing problem with telephone crossed lines with a BA back office elsewhere (in passing an aspect of telecoms that has gone completely away). The company took over the whole building some time in the late 1970s, and moved out 10 years later. The building had a substantial "refacing" of the glazed front A4 elevation, including much more rigorous double glazing. Phone number 01-759-6522 I recall (which appears thus to have been circulating uselessly in my brain these last 35 years ...).

759 being derived from SKYport on the old rotary dialling telephones. British Eagle's telephone number was SKYport 3611, BOAC's was SKYport 5511 as late as April 1969, but by October 1972 it had changed to 01-759-5511.

​​​​​​It was sorted - cabs returning to the feeder rank within a certain time period could queue-jump. Didn't stop the cabbies whinging though.

Anyone else willing to admit to buying JP World Airline Fleets from VHF supplies for spotting?

Use of 05R continued for a while longer after 1981. I had just the one landing on 05R which was 9th December 1983 on board BA315 inbound from Paris CDG, operated by Tristar-1 G-BBAH. IIRC it was a very windy night and the total flight time for the flight that I recorded was one hour twenty-seven minutes as we held for some time due to the weather conditions and the use of runway 05R. It was a pleasant surprise to me when I realised it was a 05R approach as, at that time, I lived between Staines and Laleham and a very rare opportunity to fly directly over the area at low level. Sadly, it was dark so not the view it might have been dodging amongst the clouds on a daytime flight. Certainly by this time use of 05 was pretty unusual but if the weather conditions were "right" it was still in use at this time and I believe for a while longer.

When I moved to Viscounts at London in 1960 the staff carpark for the Queens Building was a green field next door - which subsequently became the site of Terminal 1
O5 L may have been shorter than the others but I remember landing a Comet on it mid-60s. No problem with a strong north easterly

In the 60s, BEA supplemented the Vanguards between LHR and EDI, with its then 6000' runway (shorter than LHR 05L) and frequent crosswinds, substituting Comets on some services to compete with BUA and its 1-11s.

Actually the Trident 3b was more challenging than either the Comet or Vanguard on EDI 31.

Wasn't the short runway at EDI ,one of the reasons the Trident 3 had its 'extra engine . In fact as I now recall my landing on 05 was a T3 with some of the internal decor having the word Shuttle on it

I certainly bought at least one copy when I was about 13 or 14 - Civil Aircraft Markings was a bit limited in what was included.

Great thread, please keep the memories flowing!

I'm not so sure that EDI performance in particular was a design driver, but there's no doubt it helped.

Of course the real reason was that, with the curvature of the Earth being less up north, that couldn't be relied upon to get the aircraft airborne.

Gravity's stronger up there too, and you're further from the helpful pull of the moon .......

My first flight I can just remember was early '60's and would be 7or. 8. Edinburgh to London in the Vanguard. Looking at the Aircraft I thought it was a space rocket and in flight it sounded like one....
Now although I cannot remember the incident I was taken to the cockpit for the ctuise and possibly not strapped for the landing and there is / was a photo long lost of the event.😐
Later experienced a couple of Trident flights to EDI and I remember landing and stopping just before the fence and was pushed back to turn to the terminal. ..

Witnessed quite a few Vanguard, Trident and 1-11 (BUA) 'arrivals' onto RW 13 at EDI while on the UAS and AEF. This was in the late 60s before Edinburgh had radar; the routing was 'OE' and 'TRH' NDBs, procedure turn followed by ILS 13. I don't think there was an instrument approach onto RW 31 and so with a strong westerly, there was a tailwind and a crosswind. Great spectator sport!!
mcdhu

Worked in BOAC purchasing department for a while 1970, we moved from TBA into temporary accommodation at Heathrow House before the final move to the offices top of TBC. Now that provided fantastic views for the approach for 28R. Including a birds eye view of the 707 engine fire whilst performing engine runs.

Edinburgh : I seem to have been everywhere that gets discussed, and I was at university there early-mid 1970s, from the first discussions about the "new" runway (with its approach directly over our professor's house in Cramond, so we heard it all) through to its opening and the new terminal. For some reason three of the four major airports in Scotland in that era, Prestwick, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, all had their main runways at right angles to the prevailing wind. Only Glasgow was the "right way round". There was extensive coverage that because of the short runway BA had to continue using Vanguards, not jets, but when BUA started One-Eleven ops to Gatwick there were Comets, and then Tridents, slipped in at competitive times, and by the time the new runway was complete it was an all-Trident operation anyway.

Bits of the old terminal, on the opposite side of the airport, were still there when I last looked some years ago, a set which would have given Heathrow Northside a good run in the ramshackle stakes. It faced the ramp and didn't even have double glazing - Vanguards manoeuvring directly in front of the windows made any communication impossible. As these doing so were audible from up at Edinburgh Castle, 6 miles away, it must have been ear splitting for the staff.

Well remember when BUA became B Cal they introduced a 10pm departure "Moonjet" to Gatwick. I think the fare was £6.60 each way. In more recent times I went up to Edinburgh when a 146 was operating some of the Scot Airways flights from London City, otherwise a Dornier turboprop run. Left the terminal one evening, maybe 15 years ago, turned an unusual way, and actually did a runway 13 takeoff to the south-east. Just like a generation beforehand.

It was indeed £6.60. I used it just the once, while I was waiting for my BEA concessions to kick in, from which point onwards it cost me £2.20 return to go back and visit my folks, who lived in Cramond and were strong supporters of the new runway.

With admirable foresight, they had built a ground-floor extension in the early 1970s which included a skylight. :O

When I was at Glasow doing my tower training, we had a Vanguard come in on a 3 engine ferry with about a 60 deg crosswind.
All looked 'normal' until at about 100ft, I think he must have dropped full flap and the aircraft's attitude became VERY steep nose down just before flaring.
Prior to this, my instructor had asked me what 'standby' I would put on and I replied 'Local Standby' but he said 'no, Full Emergency; you'll see why'.
And I did!!

Explains why in mid 1972, BEA introduced a '£13.20p return' offer from Glasgow (maybe Edinburgh too?); you had to travel out and return weekends only a week apart to take advantage so I booked to go to Heathrow one saturday, hiring a car at Heathrow to visit my parents in Chesham, returning the following sunday.
No concessions for ATCOs those days; we were still Civil Servants and a concession, in the eyes of our bosses at the DoTI, could have been interpreted as being a 'bribe' to get preferential treatment for whichever airline we travelled on. (At least that was the 'official' reason)

A bit more on 1970s Moonjet experience here : Old Timer's Airline Quiz and Discussion. - Page 92 - FlyerTalk Forums

chevvron
Pal of mine who works a tower in the UK says that the only priority is if one of their colleagues is on board waiting for a departure. They try to make sure their holidays get off to a good start! They later report that the flight deck said: "Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm glad to say that our slot has been brought forward. Cabin Crew please take your seats."
:ok:
[allegedly]

My copy is arriving later today :) .

I was also reminded of another excellent and relevant book when moving a pile of recently read tomes last night:


This is an account of his flying career which encompasses most of the types operated by BEA/BA, plus more besides. My copy has now been recycled - to the "waiting to be read" pile, and hopefully by the time I've read it again, my bookshelves will be back up to provide a more fitting home than the top of a chest of drawers...

Recommended.

My recollection from visiting VHF Supplies (regularly by bicycle in the 1960s on a Saturday from home in Isleworth) was that one Brian Stainer also inhabited VHF Supplies shop, from where he sold his photos and slides as APN; Aviation Photo News.

And on the subject of pubs in the area, my favourite was always the Green Man, from where, sitting in the garden with a pint of Watneys you could reach up and touch the tyres of planes landing on 28L and later on 27 L

There used to be a shop on Selsdon Road in South Croydon which did mail order aircraft slides and prints - think it might have been Brian Stainer? I never went there as I bought postcards as a lad (or raided airline offices) but wasn't much interested in other people's pics.

Edit: quick research suggests definitely not Brian Stainer, does anyone else recall it? Sure they used to advertise in Air Pictorial, etc...

The Green Man at Hatton cross was indeed a good place for inbounds but you couldn't see the departures from the other side of the airport and Iwas too young to be on 'licensed premises' so it was the Cains lane A 30 junction for me. Another pub with good views on the right day (ie wind in right direction) was the Rising Sun at the end of Oaks Raod in Stanwell , cross the bridge over the two rivers and you are in the airport but the Cargo centre damaged the views when it came along

Brian Stainer I do remember , I think he had a bad leg and limp IIRC but he would stop by that junction for a chat with some of the more veteran spotters of that group. For some reason I think he had a red Del Boy style vehicle but that was an awfully long time ago. I know he was a keen and commercial photographer though and a good source of info on what might be around on the airfields local to LHR like Denham, Northolt, Fairoaks etc