Originally Posted by
cs57
4) Daily flight London-Turin (1939). This looks to be service via Paris on Avio Linee Italiane with further service to Milan and Venice. The 1939 Imperial Airways timetable shows service with "Fiat air liners" The Avio timetable shows an image of the Fiat aircraft--Fiat A 80 RC 41"-- twin engined, and roughly the same size as a DC3. Leaving London at 9:15am (Croydon) arrive Paris at 10:30; leave 10:55am, arrive Turin at 13:20. Return service left Turin at 10;30am, and back in London at 14:40. Fiat Aircraft is noted as "Fiat G18V" in above timetable.
Spot on by cs57. Not so spot on by my 1939 ABC, it seems, as they missed out showing the Paris stop shown in the airline's own material (I should have spotted this), although the times elsewhere are exactly the same so it was obviously included. In those days printed timetables worked to deadlines months ahead of the issue date, and mismatches are common. The aircraft was a Fiat G18V - the A80RC41 was actually the engine type which was fitted. It was an 18-seater, I would say more a DC2 than a DC3. Aircraft, engines, and indeed the ownership of ALI were all by Fiat, as a result of which Turin, Fiat's HQ, was a little hub for their services which spread northwards across Europe. Contemporary accounts of their arrivals at London Croydon state that the passenger loads were rarely more than a handful, and quite often nobody at all and maybe just a couple of boxes of freight; never mind, there were "other reasons" for European governments of the time to subsidise developing extensive experience of routing over to London etc ! Their daily routes included Turin-Cannes-Marseilles, so going back a few pages here that would have been a twice-daily departure 75 years ago in front of that beach I frequented last month
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_G.18
Anyone up for the other points ?