jlemon

3) Correct! Cayman Airways (the airline of "Sir Turtle") was operating up to three nonstop flights day on the GCM-MIA route, all with BAC One-Eleven aircraft.

Meantime, Republic was operating nonstop DC-9-10 service on a Saturday and Sunday only schedule.....and RC was also operating a daily flight with a DC-9-50. Republic inherited this route from Southern when SO merged with North Central to form RC. The MIA-GCM route was Southern's only international service during its existence......

Following the acquisition of RC by Northwest, NW continued to fly the MIA-GCM route with DC-9-30 equipment. I remember talking my way onto this NW flight on an NRSA airline employee pass basis after missing an earlier KX flight due to a late arriving DL flight at MIA.......the NW station manager at MIA was in a good mood that evening!

jrl767

based on a nominal operating range for a 727-100, the destination pretty much has to be in Canada ... NE was running BOS-YUL in the late 60s and early 70s, but the 727 production list doesn't show any deliveries of -95C/QC models ...



speaking of Combi (again), here's the answer to the question I tossed out a couple weeks back --

in 1977-78 Western operated a late-night 707-347C LAX-SFO-SEA-ANC, departing around 9pm PST and arriving around 330am AST

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...C_Silagi-1.jpg

jlemon

No, it was not Northeast with B727 Combi service from BOS.....

And interesting to learn of Western's B707 Combi service back in the late 70s....

jrl767

one was almost certainly Eastern, using something in the DC9 family ... probably a -30

I suspect the other was Air Florida with a 737-200

jrl767

First Air, BOS-YOW ~1990

jlemon

5) Air Florida (QH) and Eastern (EA) are both correct.....however, each airline was operating different equipment on the route. Both carriers were operating one flight a day from GNV to MIA with evening departures. QH was flying a DC-9-10 with daily except Saturday service while EA was operating a daily B727-100 flight.

BTW, Eastern was also operating five daily nonstops from GNV to ATL at this time: one flight with a B727-100, one flight with a DC-9-30 and three flights with DC-9-50 equipment.....

jlemon

8) First Air (7F) is correct! The airline was operating daily except Saturday nonstop service between Ottawa and Boston with a B727-100 Combi.

First Air (formerly Bradley Air Services) is still around although they no longer operate any scheduled passenger flights to the U.S. This Canadian air carrier flies Boeing 737-200 Combis as well as ATR-42 and ATR-72 turboprops in sched pax services. First Air also operates Lockheed L382G (L-100 Hercules) and Boeing 767-223 freighter aircraft......

jrl767

didn't 7F also operate the HS-748? as in, is "First Air" also the answer to Q6 above?

jlemon

6) Quite perceptive there, jrl22! First Air most certainly operated the Hawker Siddeley HS-748.....and one of the routes flown by the aircraft was Ottawa-Boston. 7F was operating the HS-748 on a morning roundtrip flight YOW-BOS at the same time they were operating an afternoon roundtrip flight with a B727-100 Combi on the same route. Note that my comments above concerned First Air's current fleet......

WHBM

Correct, JL. Started at the end of 1992, first flights were Moscow DME to Norilsk, in the Siberian Arctic. I do recall a BBC News clip where they went along at the beginning and treated a "Russian private airline" as a joke, laughed at a spilled coffee in the cabin, and laughed at Norilsk's tourist potential in the winter at 70 degrees north. Anyway, last laugh on Transaero because they now have a huge fleet. When recently in St Petersburg I was surprised to see one of their 747-400s at the next gate to my BA A321 at the Soviet-era little international terminal (which it towered over), departing full for, of all places, Antalya in Turkey, a Mediterranean beach resort. Transaero also started the move of international flights in Moscow to Domodedovo, away from Sheremetyevo, which many carriers apart from Aeroflot have now followed.

трансаэро

Many Russian carriers have titles in Cyrillic on one side and Roman on the other.

Peter the Great said 300 years ago that the greatest obstacle to Russia developing along with the rest of Europe was the Cyrillic alphabet instead of the Roman one. The Internet however has done for it in recent years, and many things like the Metro station signs and maps now appear with "transliteration" underneath, that is Russian names written using Roman characters - like 'Transaero' !

Correct. Much of the supersonic route was across the Kazakh SSR desert, sparsely populated (at least, not by anyone important to Moscow). Freight (actually mail, plus that most essential Soviet commodity, today's edition of 'Pravda') from 1975, and a few passenger flights from 1977. Given up in 1978 after the loss of a Tu144 aircraft near Yegoryevsk. Alma Ata is nowadays Almaty, the principal city of Kazakhstan.

C'mon Mini, you know St. Petersburg didn't exist in 1980

But apart from that, correct.

jlemon

Very interesting to learn of the loss of a Tu144 SST near Yegoryevsk in 1978.

WHBM, would you have any details concerning this accident?

WHBM

It was CCCP-77111, the 10th production aircraft, on 28 May 1978. It caught fire in midair and made an emergency landing in fields. Yegoryevsk is just outside Moscow, not too far from the Monino museum.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/...?id=19780523-1

jrl767

browsing some old posts that I hadn't previously read ...



... fading memories and lack of readily available real documentation ...

I have boarding passes, and ticket jackets where I wrote the aircraft number


... LAX-IAD red-eyes nonstop with a 733 ... CO flew 733s from the merger which were equipped with IFE specifically installed by NYAir for that route ...

Apr 86, CO 22, N16301 (actually CO's first 733)


... Eastern flew LAX-ORD as part of their Moonlight Specials ...

Jan 86, EA 1698, A300 N220EA


from about age 5 on, I would bug my parents to stop by the airport in pretty much any major city that we transited on our numerous car trips ... the jaunt to EXPO 67 in Montreal was no exception, and I distinctly remember taking several photos of the Nordair Super Connie on the far side of the runway

I also recall taking pix of two classic large turboprops that afternoon ... a Vanguard and a TU-114

WHBM

Strangely the 1967 Aeroflot timetable, which is on line at Timetable Images, does not show any service to Montreal, whereas my Tu114 history I have here says the service there started on 4 November 1966, changing over to an IL-62 on 15 September 1967, so the huge Tupolev would have handled what Expo67 traffic there was from Moscow. Actually there was probably quite a bit; the Soviet Pavilion was one of the largest there, and, never ones to waste a building, it was dismantled afterwards and shipped back to Moscow where it was erected in VDNKh, a vast Soviet-era permanent exposition site in the north of the city, nowadays sadly dilapidated and quiet. It does have a Tu154 and a Yak-42, plus some rockets, on plinths at the main entrance !

jlemon

Well, I've been puzzling over this quiz item for awhile now....so it's time to venture forth with some type of answer.

I believe Tupolev built one prototype of the Tu-144 followed by sixteen production models.

The Concorde, on the other hand, saw a total of 20 examples built if my memory serves me correctly. However, of this 20, I believe only fourteen were destined for airline use by BA and AF......