I am a former Merchant Navy officer and in 1968 my company chartered a complete Dan Air Comet to fly a total change of crew and engine room spares from Gatwick to Bahrain. Flying overseas to join and leave ships later became very common but it was fairly unusual in 1968. We gathered and overnighted at a Gatwick hotel and flew out the next day stopping to refuel in Nicosia. For many on board this was their first experience of flying, but I was experienced and it was my second flight! It was much warmer in Nicosia than Gatwick and the Captain said we were taking the maximum distance for take off due to our weight and the rise in temperature. We went roaring down the runway and suddenly aborted with Captain coming on the PA saying we had to have another go as we were unlikely to have cleared the end of the runway. One or two people looked mildly nervous at this stage. Off we went down the runway again and aborted again. By this time many were starting to think that this flying lark was not such a good idea. The Captain now said we are going to have one more go but if that fails we will have to off load some weight. I can only presume we must have been right up against the grass at one end of the runway as we prepared for take off and this time we made it to the substantial relief of everyone on board. We duly arrived in Bahrain Airport which as I recall it was pretty much Nissen Huts in those days and we were left outside the building in the sun waiting for the transport to our tanker. The main event was the arrival of two Gulf Air DC3's (from memory) and the very attractive GF air hostesses walking across the tarmac. Just in passing our flight home was from Hong Kong over 8 months later and this time it was a chartered Brittania Airways Brittania aircraft flying to Luton. We stopped to refuel at Bangkok, Calcutta, Karachi, Istanbul and somewhere in Europe I cannot remember and the flight took a stately 27 hours. We picked the crew that had been left outward in Karachi so we had plenty of time to socialise with the first crew and a couple of dates resulted. It remains one of the best flights I have ever taken.

I remember handwriting tickets for Dan Air's Inverness Heathrow route. We booked using a view data system called ABC EasyRes!

We were not happy when BA took over due mainly to BA's disciplined corporate style. DA used to give us great deals but maybe that contributed to their demise.

I flew them from Gatwick to Berlin I think - must have been roundtrip but I only remember the outbound.
Until recent years the odd galley canister at LGW could be seen as having come from the acquisition

In the same way British Mediterranean Airways still lives on in the galleys of Loganair.

GB Airways continues to lurk in Easyjet galleys.

I only flew Dan-Air once, on a school-organised skiing trip around 1987, to Austria. I don't recall too many details of the aircraft, but the view of the Alps from the window was memorable.

Mind your head
 

Just booked a family day trip on August 28th to the Scottish Museum of Flight (via EDI) to go and have a look at the Comet 4C, amongst other things (such as G-BOAA). Very good excuse to get up there.

After a bit of digging in the loft, I found some relics of my Dan Air flight to Jersey and back on a HS748. I guess it would be 1973 or so. Even in those days I kept good records, including flight times.

Registration looks like G-ARMW - anywhere I can find a record of that?

To answer my own question, there is a wonderful collection of old timetables online, and my sister "Jeniffer" (as I referred to her) recalls it was July 1974.

http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...4/da744-08.jpg

So I even have a flight number for the first leg, DA391. Most exciting, that's certainly going on myflightradar24 when I've found the rest of the trip...