17. It's the summer of 1968 and you are in Madrid. You have been requested to attend a meeting in Santiago, Chile on fairly short notice. You are in luck as there is a flight which only operates once a week that fits your schedule. You will depart Madrid at 11:45 pm and arrive into Santiago at 1:50 pm the next day. Five stops will be made en route but you'll be in first class, of course. Identify the airline, all five stops in order and the aircraft type
Originally Posted by
WHBM
Boy, this could be anybody, as many of the major European carriers ran to South America stopping at Madrid. I'm guessing it's not Iberia or LAN, but someone stopping at Madrid on the way.
Let's go as a starter for British United, with their VC-10 which had taken over the route from BOAC Comet 4s a couple of years previously. In which case 5 intermediate stops would be Las Palmas, Rio, Sao Paolo, Montevideo and Buenos Aires. These flights ran twice-weekly, but alternated between Madrid and Lisbon, once a week at each. They crew changed twice, at Las Palmas and Sao Paolo, the crew dropped back three or four days each time, and were away from home for three weeks. At Las Palmas they used the same hotel as the "milk run" BUA One-Eleven which night stopped there on its once-weekly run to and from the west coast of Africa, and from the account of a nowadays grandfather, but then junior FO, when they coincided a good time was had by all ...
If it's not BUA, ignore all this bit.
If this is true, my guess would be that it stopped in Campinas after Rio, not Sao Paulo. Guarulhos is the big international airport of Sao Paulo, sort of like the JFK of Sao Paulo, but for many years until the late 1980's, passengers had to travel far far away to Campinas. An alternative was to use CGH, sort of like the LaGuardia of Sao Paulo, and fly to Rio.
I offer a different answer. I don't think it is Iberia or Lan Chile because once a week is far too infrequent for those major players in that market. Ditto to Lufthansa, which can tap the German Chilean population. Thanks to my quiz colleagues, who helped answer a question I posed a few weeks ago about FRA-SJU and beyond to South America, I offer an alternate routing.
Air France, Boeing 707, beginning in Orly but the routing from Spain would be MAD - San Juan SJU - Caracas CCS - Bogata BOG - Lima LIM - Antofagasta Chile (copper mining traffic) - SCL
CORRECTION: Antofagasta, Chile would be really odd and a Hail Mary answer so I substitute a Quito stop before Lima.
If this is the answer, I wonder if the plane was fairly empty between LIM and SCL or if they carried a lot of traffic. Around Christmas 1985, an Eastern Airlines 727 crashed in Bolivia after hitting a mountain on an Asuncion - La Paz - several stops - Miami flight. The Asuncion - La Paz flight had fewer than 30 passengers. That leads me to believe that the last leg might have few passengers but the economics of airlines were different then.