jlemon

Many thanks! I also flew on Twin Otter service operated by a Metro division in the Caribbean back in the mid 1980's. It was my very first trip to the Caribbean with a long day of travel featuring a pre-dawn departure on board a SkyWest Metro III from San Luis Obispo to LAX, an American DC-10 through flight from LAX to San Juan via a stop at DFW (all the way in first class, no less) and finally an Eastern Metro Express Twin Otter from San Juan to St. Croix. Later during my visit to St. Croix, I hopped on Twin Otter flights operated by EA Metro over to St. Thomas as well as to Tortola and Virgin Gorda in the BVI.

Toshbaf

Correct! Your thinking is correct. Pan Am Tegel to Riem. By 1984, there were some nicely painted 737-200's. They operated 6 flights daily, 7 on Saturday. Air France flew to Dusseldorf.

Toshbaf

Correct! Some airlines had paper coupons the same size as the ticket. TWA had stickers. The TWA stickers were white with a pattern of red TWA's on it. One's frequent flyer number was printed on them in the style of a dot matrix printer.

Toshbaf

Almost done! All well done so far!

1. This answer was given from the previous round

1969
11. Huntsville being the second stop is correct! Here's the sched...

EA 665: Chicago O'hare (ORD) 6:30p - 8:14p Huntsville (HSV) 8:44p - 9:10p Birmingham (BHM) 9:35p - 10:24p Mobile (MOB)
Freq: Daily
Equip: Electra PROPJET
Service classes: A/T
Meal service: Dinner ORD-HSV

Fast forward to early 1992. You are again in Birmingham, Alabama in the late afternoon and head to the airport for an evening departure to Chicago O'Hare. How can you get there with a one stop (no change of plane) in Huntsville? In fact, through passengers are allowed to stay on the plane. Airline and aircraft, please.

jrl767

Seat 2A

Nicely done with these questions, Toshbaf! I dare say you've got a knack for both questions and responses and I'm sure I speak for many here when I say we hope you'll submit more. ^

Toshbaf

Thanks for the encouragement! Are you preparing the next quiz?

I found out that making questions is hard work, particularly if one doesn't have an OAG.

There's still one question left. Basically it's "1992, who flies BHM - HSV - ORD, leaving BHM around 5 pm). BTW, Huntsville, Alabama has a very long runway, one of the longest in the region and even the U.S.

WHBM

It was an interesting operation. Only aircraft registered to and operated by the "four powers" were allowed to run along the three Air Corridors across East Germany - I mean of course the German Democratic Republic. Saying "East Germany" was not allowed, to the extent that any road atlases that had this printed in them were confiscated at the road borders. They must have had to memorise lists of the offending publications, but would still ostentatiously page through any road atlas in the car, checking also you had not written any abuse about leader Erich Honeker (not the President, this was a Socialist country, he was General Secretary of The Party - same thing of course).

The corridors were fixed in 1945, maximum height 10,000 feet from unpressurised aircraft times, maximum speed 250 knots, which was never changed and of course made jet operation very inefficient, but it only took about 30 minutes to get to the border when you climbed to normal height.

The key two operators long term were Pan Am and BEA, later BA. Air France also maintained a minimal operation, normally through routed to Paris, to maintian their position. Theoretically Aeroflot could have run the routes as well, but chose not to. The flight crews had to be from the relevant country, so any foreign national pilots were not eligible. Cabin crew were locally from Berlin. Unlike the land corridor routes there was no checking of Papers at the borders so anyone could travel. Licences for the scheduled routes were not given out by the civil authorities, but by the Allied Air Attaches, in Bonn. Everything was different. There were airports in each of the three sectors in West Berlin, Tempelhof in the US, Tegel in the French, and Gatow in the British. Tempelhof was the grand Central Europe Airport of the 1930s with its classic terminal, right in the inner city, as if New York had an airport halfway up Central Park. Inbound flights passed over the border between East and West Berlin at about 2,000 feet with the runway ahead. Initially airlines used airports in their own sector, but progressively all moved to Tempelhof. In 1975 a new terminal was built at Tegel, which had longer runways, and all operations were moved over there. That's the hexagonal-shaped buildings still in use today. Schonefeld airport, in the East, is actually just outside the Berlin city border, and that gave its own difficulties for people who were entitled to go to East Berlin, but not to the GDR (and vice-versa). Very few other western airlines served Berlin, but of those who did, KLM and Finnair, they had to use Schonefeld only, they were not allowed in the corridors.

Often thought that Pan Am were the initial operators of the corridor routes, but in fact it was American Overseas Airlines, the international offshoot of American Airlines, who ran them in the early years, it was only after Pan Am merged them in 1950, including their substantial transatlantic operations, that they first came to Berlin. When the fleets merged in the AOA DC-4s stayed at Berlin, their "Flagship" names changed to "Clipper" names, and were the core of the Pan Am corridor fleet up to about 1960.

Apart from the schedules, a substantial series of holiday flights developed to the Mediterranean resorts, Alpine ski slopes, and such like. The UK holiday airlines were the principals here, Laker and Dan-Air had longstanding arrangements and cabin crew bases, BEA Airtours also ran with their Comet 4Bs, and others came and went. Even when our old friends Channel Airways were reduced to only being able to keep one of their Tridents going, it was based not in the UK but at Berlin. As Britannia Airways had the contract for years for military flights from Britain to Germany they were in there many days as well, and the ramp could look more like Gatwick, or Saturday at Palma, with them all. Monarch later took over the Laker work. Britannia 737 troop charters sometimes still used Gatow airfield, to the end. US charter operators had various goes as well, Saturn in the 1960s, then Aeroamerica with their old 720s, and finally a US-funded operation called Air Berlin, the start of the modern incarnation of that operator.

There was no major maintenance facility at Berlin, nor space for one. Pan Am's 727s were maintained at Frankfurt, while the BA aircraft were cycled back and forth, spending just a few days there. When BEA replaced the Viscounts with the One-Elevens, their maintenance base was at Manchester, and the several Manchester to West German cities services were all through-routed to Berlin.

I see in 1947 the one-way fare on American Overseas from Berlin to Frankfurt was 30 US Dollars. I can see just the odd advanced ticket on Easyjet for about the same, today, 72 years on.

I first went to Berlin, to Tegel on a Dan-Air charter flight from London Gatwick in the early 1980s, a One-Eleven. It surprised me all the cabin crew were German and spoke German first on the PA. Of course, they were from the base there. Being British, I was entitled to cross into East Berlin, but not beyond. I actually found it quite interesting. You had to change 30 West German Deutschemarks for 30 DDR Marks at a 1:1 rate, and couldn't change them back. But in 1991, right after the wall came down, Tempelhof reopened, and I went from London City to there on a Conti-Flug BAe146, just the right aircraft for a Tempelhof approach. There was a Sabena 146 in there as well when we arrived. Out of the terminal straight into apartments and streets, there was a corner shop with a set of steps next to it down to a U-Bahn subway station, all pretty mid-morning quiet. In came the train, just two cars, maybe a dozen passengers got on. All a strange feeling. It was a real shame that Tempelhof was closed down about 10 years ago. The classic 1930s building and runways are still there, along with the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) 1920s/30s apartment buildings outside. I see the U-Bahn steps now have a rain cover https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4850...7i13312!8i6656

kochleffel

I had the same surprise aboard a Pan Am 727 in 1970, Frankfurt to Tempelhof. I had flown to Frankfurt in a Luxair F27 and it was a even bigger surprise to be offered a tumbler of neat Scotch at 9:30 a.m. I was not yet old enough to drink in the U.S.

Track

Perhaps I can illustrate the difficulties in Berlin travel before the wall came down. As a student in Berlin I traveled Munich-Riem to Berlin-Tempelhof in 1968 on a Pan Am 727 and then Berlin-Tempelhof to Cologne on a BEA Viscount (for a train connection to Luxembourg and the Loftleidir CL-44 flight back to New York). That was all simple, cheap and easily arranged. As an American diplomat assigned to Vienna in 1981, however, I confronted an intransigent East German (DDR) bureaucracy. I wanted to visit some friends in Berlin, and, as a railfan, wanted to go by train as much as possible. I chose Vienna-Hanover-Berlin-Vienna as my route, the last segment on the East Berlin-Vienna sleeper via Prague. The Hanover-Berlin trip resulted in DDR entry and departure stamps in my diplomatic passport, and since the four-power occupation of Berlin was still in effect, my passport was only viewed but not stamped (for Allied military and diplomats) when crossing from West Berlin into East Berlin, from where the Vienna train left. I was not allowed onto the train in East Berlin, however, because I had no entry stamp in my passport for the DDR from West Berlin (and East Germans, with tacit Soviet support, upheld the idea that East Berlin was part of the DDR) and would therefore not be allowed to leave the DDR at the Czech border. So I returned to West Berlin and planned to get on the Berlin-Vienna sleeper at Berlin-Schoenefeld airport (an intermediate train stop and in the DDR, outside of four-power occupied Berlin) and get to Schoenefeld by the airport bus service from West Berlin, which conveniently avoided East Berlin. Unfortunately this bus service was available only for air passengers, not for connections to the rail station. So I booked Interflug Berlin-Schoenefeld to Prague (on an Ilyushin 18), took the bus and waited at the train station until the Vienna train pulled in. I told the sleeping-car porter I would get on the train in Prague and asked him not to sell my berth. I then flew to Prague, had a nice dinner and slept on the train to Vienna.

Toshbaf

So many wonderful stories about West Berlin from the PA Tegal-Riem question!

West Berlin had their own postage stamps and did not use Federal Republic of Germany stamps.

I drove a rental car from Hof to Berlin via the Soviet Sector on my first trip to Europe. I got a DDR passport stamp. On the border with West Berlin, the West Berlin border guard asked me a question but I did not understand it. He repeated it then smiled and waved me through. I wonder what he asked me? My German was very minimal, mostly "Is die Post offen, Otto?"

WHBM

This bus used to leave from the Zoo train station in the middle of West Berlin, an interesting East German Ikarus vehicle. The direct route to Schonefeld is east, immediately through into East Berlin and then across the (unmarked) border into DDR proper shortly before the airport. But it drove south instead, to cross directly into the DDR, and then worked around the outer ring Autobahn, dating from the 1930s, to get to Schonefeld. I didn't ever take it, but photographed it. There was what I guess was a security guard from the Stasi (in a suit) at the front, presumably to ensure the driver (traditional medium blue uniform with peaked hat) did not escape. However, in normal socialist style you would not get such a driving job unless you had a family, wife and children, firmly back in the East, one of the better flats, and had maybe finally managed to get a Trabant.

The division of families between east and west was ameliorated to an extent by those in the DDR being able to take holidays in fellow socialist countries like Bulgaria. These were separately marketed in West Germany (and even Britain), which led to Balkan holiday flights at various West German airports, as well as a substantial programme of Interflug and Balkan flights from East Germany, and the family would spend a couple of weeks together. Even Sochi, in the Soviet Union, was a part of this. IL-18s remained on the East German flights to the end, whereas jets (Tu134 and Tu154) were used on the western flights from first availability. In Britain they had most success not in London but in the northern industrial areas where socialist ideals were stronger, particularly the coal mining areas, and where the Union often acted as the intermediary travel agent (anyone remember Co-op Travel ?), leading to the Balkan (and Tarom from Romania) Tupolevs long being summer weekend regulars at airports like East Midlands or Newcastle in the 1970s-80s.

Seat 2A

Seat 2A

Apologies. Dupe post.

Toshbaf

Oh, I didn't know that!