WHBM

It was surprising how few 727s were run by the Supplementals in the 1960s-70s, and because Boeing never offered the 727-200C (anyone know why not) the handful were all the original size. World had half a dozen (normally with most leased out), TIA as here had a few, American Flyers had two ... that's all I can think of.

And surprisingly they did quite a lot of Transatlantic work with them, generally staging through Gander. American Flyers were pretty regular with them at Gatwick in the summer around 1970, and the others turned up as well. I presume they did winter work down to the Caribbean.

I've written before how we took a Wardair 727 Prestwick - Sondrestrom (Greenland) - Vancouver in 1968, a comparable operation.

As well as having the freight door capability, whether used or not, the US Supplemental carrier aircraft were all fully rigged up for over-ocean flights, with full liferafts, Loran navigation, HF radio, etc. It always came as a real surprise to find mainstream aircraft confined to the North American continent with simplistic seat-bottom "use this cushion as a life preserver", etc. Every flight you take in Europe, even UK domestic prop aircraft, has the full set of rafts and lifejackets, and goes through the whole drill before every flight. Operators to Hawaii would have a special subset of the fleet rigged up properly.

It followed that much of the US airline fleet was not readily used on overseas flights. For example, when National got the Miami-London route (1969) they had a good number of DC-8s, but none fitted for over ocean work, nor were the crews trained in this. I don't think they even had over-ocean capability on their Air Operators Certificate. So they had to lease in two DC8-54F (of course with the unused freight door) from Airlift, a Miami Supplemental/cargo carrier. Aircraft N108RD and N109RD were repainted in National colours, they had Airlift flight deck crews, they had been with various other leases previously such as Japan Air Lines, and held down the London route for several years. Airlift actually did the technical management and flight dispatch, as they had the capability and licences for such work and National didn't until their 747s came along.