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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0425.PDF
FLIGHT, 6 April 1961 433 Left, Braniff handle BOAC at Lima. Right, Lima International through the morning haze. Below, typical scenery in the Cordilleras, north of Lima 86° in August. The sea is a startling pale blue, the vegetation a •crisp sub-tropical green, the local atmosphere British shop-window and the visitors 99.9 per cent American—in Bermuda shorts. Kindley USAFB, at the east end, was full of KB-50J tankers, RC-121 radar pickets, T-29 navigation trainers and a cross-section oftransports. The civil terminal is tucked away at one end of the airfield.If Bermuda is a tidy step from Heathrow, Lima is an even tidier one, but our flight time was very little longer. We took off inthe morning, Capt Cracknell in charge, and made the 900 mile dog-leg to Nassau in order to join the standard airway route acrossCuba, Jamaica, Panama and on down the South American coast, past Cape Mala, Esmeraldas, Salinas (Ecuador) and Talara inPeru. It is mostly a VHF route for communications, a frequency of 126.9Mc/s being almost universal, with NDBs for navigation.Towards the south, the aids tend to be privately owned by airlines, rather than provided by the State, and there are some gaps inVHF coverage. The route follows the coast in order to avoid the turbulence of the mountainous areas, where many of the peaks towerup to 20,000ft. From the air the Caribbean is a splendid blue, curled with coralreefs and colour-patterns like cream half-mixed in fruit syrup. The cu-nims rise with the morning sun and tower to 707 cruisingheights—and they are so rough that local operators stop flying at night when such weather is about. In six minutes we crossed thePanama isthmus—near the canal, the captain remarked, and some of us made out the Gatun lake. Then the Pacific stretched away,infinite and grey, as we headed across for Esmeraldas in north-east Ecuador. We saw some of the coast through gaps in cloud; andthe cu-nims continued to tower far on our left, but now marking some of the first of those peaks. Minutes after Esmeraldas wecrossed the equator, trying to feel as if we were really changing from winter to summer, but the air conditioning stayed the sameand no one could think of anything commemorative to do in time. Some 50 minutes later we had passed Ecuador and caught ourfirst sight of Peru. I had expected lush coastal plains nestling in the lap of the Andes, but from Talara, on the edge of the Lima FIR,for 560 miles down to Lima itself there was little but brown desert. There were flourishing oil wells, too, but we could not discernthem. Occasionally, jagged patterns of violent green marked irrigated and fertile land in some of the valleys. Elsewhere veritableglaciers of gravel lay poured down steep valleys. Farther to our left, still the giant saw-blade of mountain peaks. BOAC is represented in Peru by the Pacific Steam NavigationCo and handled by Braniff Airways. The latter company therefore Above right, the passenger hall at Seawell Airport, Barbados. Right, the Britannia 312 preparing to de- port from Barbados **•••"*% y^ \%
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