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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0398.PDF
406 FLIGHT, 30 Marc/? 1961 Speedbird Anniversary BOAC IS TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD NEXT SATURDAY, April 1, British Overseas Airways Corporation will be twenty-one years old. On April 1,1940, the new corporation took over the assets of Imperial Airways and British Airways. These companies had already become merged in all but name when their fleets were placed at the disposal of the government on the outbreak of war seven months before. For its first five years BOAC operated in a world at war, performing tasks as diverse as they were important to the Allies' war effort. Links with the Commonwealth, pioneered during the preceding two decades, were kept open in the face of appalling difficulties. New routes were operated and scheduled services across the Atlantic were begun. Passengers and cargoes of strategic importance were carried, often in circumstances of great danger. In 1945 the corporation emerged from the war with an ad hoc fleet comprising seventeen types of aircraft, almost wholly conversions of military machines. Uneconomic to operate, it was with these that BOAC began the long, hard road to commercial profitability. The lack of suitable equipment was to plague the corporation for ten years more; courageous pioneering ventures were met with disappointing and sometimes disastrous setbacks. In the pictures in these pages, selected at random from the airline's library of over 30,000 photographs and from Flight's own files, we portray some aspects in the history of an enterprise which, born to a baptism under fire and weaned in wartime, has since become one of the great names in peacetime mercantile aviation. Long stretches of the "horseshoe" route, linking South Africa, the MiddleEast, India, Australia and New Zealand were flown until 1945 by the famous Short C-class Empire flying boats. "Cleopatra" and "Corsair"are seen here riding at moorings in Mombasa, "Corsair" had force-landed in the Belgian Congo some months before the war, but a nine-monthsalvage operation restored her to the fleet in 1940. In the Congo she left behind a new village, Corsairville BO AC's first aircraft were inherited from ImperialAirways and British Airways. Here an ex-Imperial Armstrong Whitworth Ensign is seen in wartime paintover Khartoum. Several Ensigns were early casualties in the retreat from France, maintaining a scheduledservice to Paris until two days before the city fell Adaptations of military aircraft were impressed in BOAC service overvital routes. Mosquitos maintained a hazardous link between Scotland and Sweden, carrying very important passengers andconsignments of ball bearings. For the VIPs there was very "infra- dig" accommodation. Only two could be carried—strapped in thebomb bay Passengers for a flying boat leaving Poole Harbour, UK flying boatterminal for the duration of the war, undergo the inevitable Customs examination. In this respect air travel never changes, come war or peace
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