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Aviation History
1972
1972 - 0685.PDF
if*5 «-.**• TEMPLEWOOD EXPANDS EXPANSION into aircraft operations in addition to aircraft brokerage has been announced by Templewood Aviation of Windsor, England. But the company will not be operating under its own name. "Our operations are to be confined solely to wet and 'semi-wet' leases undertaken on behalf of existing airlines, especially the developing smaller national airlines in South-east Asia and Africa," said Templewood director Tony Griffin last week. The company has bought two ex-Air Canada Vanguards from Air Holdings; the first of these is. being operated for Merpati Nusantara of Indonesia. Templewood has an operations manager with the airline, Simon de Sudbury, and maintenance has been contracted to Aviation Traders, which is an Air Holdings subsidiary. The second Vanguard will be delivered to Indonesia in May. British Airways Board has appointed two new members, both from BOAC. They are Charles Abell, the corporation's engineering director, and Peter Hermon, its management services director. 747 lower lounge Boeing has built a mock-up of a lower- deck lounge for the 747. Access would be via the spiral staircase now serving the upper deck, which would be Interflug is operating the 11-62 on intercontinental services. Among these are two flights a week between East Berlin and Cairo moved to the rear of the upper lounge and suitably extended downwards. The lower-deck cargo capacity of the 747 is often under-utilised in airline service. (See photo graph, opposite page.) Boeing forecasts that North Atlantic traffic will grow by an average of 12-7 per cent per year between 1970 and 1975, it was stated last week. The company believes that 1972 will see a 17 per cent increase. The number of transatlantic passengers in 1975 will total 18-2 million if the forecast is correct. Bahamas World Airlines, hit by landing-rights difficulties at Frankfurt, has now obtained approval to operate charter flights to Philadelphia and Detroit with its leased Boeing 707. The original intention had been to operate charters from West Germany to the Bahamas, but little flying has been possible in recent months, apart from occasional regional flights and a sub-charter for International Air Bahama. Bahamas World services are operated with British Caledonian flight crews and with Braniff engineering support. Lessons of an accident report Norman Tebbit MP, chairman of the Air Safety Group, considers the Spanish Air Ministry investigation into the Comet accident near Barcelona on July 3, 1970, and points out some difficulties which arose during the inquiry. THE REPORT OF THE INQUIRY into the Dan-Air Comet G-APDN accident near Barcelona in July 1970 was published in Britain on February 18, 1972. It was greeted with some criticism, notably in Flight's editorial of March 9. The conclusion of the report was accepted without reservation by the Department of Trade and Industry in Britain, though the report apparently contains some serious defects or omissions which British observers feel would not have been present in a comparable Accident Investigation Branch report. Certainly it is not easy to follow, as there is no airways chart to relate to the track map of the flight path. A failure to correct aircraft clock time and air traffic control time to a common base (they differed by some three minutes), which made for difficulty in reading the report, has been the subject of a corri gendum by DTI. Another omission, that of the relevant duty and rest periods for the technical crew, was made good on March 20, in answer to a Parliamentary question from the author, and showed no malpractice. No information has been officially published on the tuning of the navigation radios, but it is known that they were returned to Britain for examination and it was established that one VOB was tuned to Barcelona. The condition of the ADFs made a positive finding impossible but the strong possibility is that they were tuned to the outer marker NDB. Similarly, though no direct reference is made to the altimeter settings, it is clear that they were correctly set and working. The accident, says the report, was caused primarily by a misidentification of the aircraft on radar. Perhaps the most regrettable omission, therefore, is that no attention is drawn to the fact that the aircraft was fitted with a radar transponder which would have provided positive identifica tion had secondary radar been available to the ATC officer at Barcelona. Since this has now been installed and com missioned, the Spanish authorities have missed a chance both to allay public anxiety about the adequacies of the continued on page 445
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