9) This airline was operating direct, one stop, no change of plane service from Berlin to Damascus (DAM) once a week. I'll just pop in here to offer that the aircraft was a Super Caravelle ..... because I saw this flight. However this sighting might have been one or two years earlier, 91 or 92. I was in Berlin, had been to Schoenefeld airport (as you do !) and had noticed from the timetable that this Caravelle was still running, operating once-weekly Copenhagen-Berlin SXF-Athens-Damascus. Back in GDR days, only a couple of years earlier at the time, Interflug had also run from Berlin to Damascus at low frequency, this had gone but the Syrianair remained. It would have been an interesting flight to have seen .... except there were no sightseeing facilities at Schoenefeld at all.

So a couple of days later (and I believe it was Saturday, late lunchtime), having forgotten this, I was in the local S-Bahn train some miles north of the airport, heading for Erkner, looking out of the window as we were going along - and there was the Caravelle, inbound from Copenhagen, on finals for SXF. It passed ahead of the train so I saw it from both sides as it descended to the runway. It was the last Caravelle I EVER saw airborne. More recent ones were all in museums.

Syrianair's last two Caravelles (YK-AFB and -AFD) lasted until December 1994, some of the last in use anywhere. They were the later, Pratt & Whitney-powered Super Caravelle. One was new to them in 1966, the other was ex-Sterling Airways. Long-time thread readers here will recall we did Sterling Caravelles way, way back last year, so we've gone right round in a circle !