WHBM

JL gets the teaser !

Yes, Northeast Airlines ordered Britannias for their Florida routes, but couldn't raise the finance at the 11th hour, when they were all sat painted up at the factory in Belfast. And here's one sat there wondering what it's fate will be.

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgur...tart=0&ndsp=15

Eventually El Al leased it for a while, so it did get to New York in the end, then it went to British United, and ended up like so many Britannias with grey market operators in Africa.

S2A, do you have a Northeast Britannia in your postcard collection ? Looks like things were so near they might have had postcards printed.

jlemon

Unfortunately, jl has no bloody idea....

Although I do know that following a disastrous merger attempt with Golden Gate Airlines which resulted in Golden Gate quickly going out of business, the Swift Aire F27s wound up with Air North in the northeast U.S. and I do not believe the basic WI livery was changed on the aircraft.

WHBM

According to Fokker the F70s were sold to Mountain West Airlines, which was yet another subsidiary of Mesa. These aircraft are now operating for KLM, and can be seen at minor UK airports most days.

Seat 2A

At present, my postcard collection (which is housed in binders which are themselves housed in fourteen bankers boxes) is in my storage locker about 5 miles from here. I'll be fetching them in the next week or and as such have appended a post-it notice on my fridge to check this out.

Any thoughts on the BWIA picture?

jlemon

29. Montreal (YUL) is correct! The Eastern Provincial B737-200 service operated nonstop between Charlo and Montreal five days a week but not on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

jrl767

the only local service carrier operating into TOL was Allegheny, and I'm almost 100% certain that in 1976 they didn't go farther south or west than Memphis

now going by process of elimination among the trunk carriers:

• American and Braniff were in SAT but not TOL, and I think that was the case for Eastern as well
• the opposite was true for United
• Continental, National, Northwest, Pan Am, TWA, and Western weren't at either city

so that leaves us with Delta ... I can certainly place them in TOL, and it would make sense that they were starting to make inroads into Texas beyond their Dallas and Houston service about this time

as far as the four-stop routing, let's try TOL-SAT via

1. Dayton (DAY)
2. Cincinnati (CVG)
3. Atlanta (ATL)
4. Houston (IAH)

I can imagine a DC9-30 on TOL-DAY-CVG, but I'm thinking their logic was that they could fill up a 72S with ATL traffic from those three points and keep it reasonably full on ATL-IAH-SAT

WHBM

Ah yes; it's a busy evening over here and I'm trying to keep up. Have just secured Little Miss WHBM's High Chair, where a current nursery song of Row, Row, Row The Boat was being translated now home into violent rocking side-to-side which we could see ending in tears. Out with the toolbox (metric), and some tensioned string attached to the central heating pipework in two directions. A real engineering jury rig !

BOAC operated the flights for BWIA and the aircraft just operated through from London through New York as BOAC, and then down to the Caribbean as BWIA. In 1962 this was just once a week. I don't have it down as one of their many BOAC rentals of Britannias, which normally meant that it would be a different aircraft each time. Either someone at JFK was very quick up the ladder putting on the BWIA titles (in BOAC style, just 3 letters needed changing), or it was rigged for a publicity shot, which looking at the pose and the airline script in the lower left corner is what I'm guessing it is.

jlemon

34. Delta Air Lines is correct! DL was operating Super DC8-61 aircraft on both of these flights. However, neither of these flights stopped at Dallas/Ft. Worth. Here are the eastbound scheds.....

DL 972: SFO 7:44am - 8:48am LAX 9:25am - 2:32p MSY 3:20pm - 8:33pm SJU
Op: Daily
Equip: D8S
Note: No local traffic SFO-LAX

DL 984: SFO 9:20pm - 10:24pm LAX 11:05pm - 4:12am MSY 5:00am - 10:13am SJU
Op: Friday & Saturday only (next day arrival)
Equip: D8S
Note: No local traffic SFO-LAX

BTW, there was competition westbound from San Juan to San Francisco: AA 47 operating SJU-EWR-ORD-SFO on a daily except Saturdays basis with a Boeing 707.

jrl767

I seem to recall DL operating that Stretch 8 nonstop LAX<-->SJU, but that was probably a couple years later ...

jlemon

38. Absolutely correct! It was American Trans Air (ATA) operating a B727-200 in an all Y configuration on a daily round trip routing of MDW-SRQ-MIA.

jlemon

33. Well, you did get two of the four intermediate stops right.....however, the airline was not Delta nor was the aircraft a D9S or 72S.

So please guess again!

jlemon

Actually earlier during the early 1970's. Depending on the specific time frame, Delta was operating either DC8-51 (D8F) or Super DC8-61 (D8S) aircraft nonstop between LAX and SJU. Eastbound flights tended to be red eyes and were not operated on a daily basis (for example, three to five days a week depending on the time of year).

jrl767

33: given that I have two of the enroute stops, I will now speculate this was an Eastern operation

how about TOL - Nashville (BNA) - ATL - New Orleans (MSY) - IAH - SAT

as for equipment, let's go with the standard-size jet (727-25); if not that, a DC9-10

miniliq

I believe the intermediate cities were Dusseldorf, Hamburg and Copenhagen. So the three permutations that seem to make sense are FRA-DUS-CPH-ANC, FRA-HAM-CPH-ANC, and FRA-DUS-HAM-ANC.

jlemon

33. Eastern operating a B727-100 is correct as are the intermediate stops in ATL and IAH. However, this flight did not stop in BNA or MSY. So we are still looking for two more stops here.....