Imperial Airdays are here again

Ralf Roggeveen

Ralf Roggeveen

Charter Member
If, like me, you are suffering bad withdrawal symptoms from Nikko's 1962 retro flight not appearing for a while, here's something that might cheer you up bit...

Let's take this for a spin:

View attachment 43201

Where to start?

Ah, yes: there:


View attachment 43202

Once managed to install a lot of different '30s aircraft here, but unfortunately that's not been saved. All we find today is this beautiful but sinister German:

View attachment 43203


The passengers board our Handley Page:


View attachment 43205

"I'm terribly sorry, Sir. You may not fly with Imperial Airways in brown shoes."

It's about two hours to our first stop. Nice view of Croydon after we've circled round:

View attachment 43204

We cross the English coast near Brighton:


View attachment 43206


Flying these things feels a bit like driving a car from place to place - and at about the same speed.

There is a distressing few minutes when neither the English coast behind, nor the French one ahead, can be seen. Doing this you begin to realise why they were so keen on flying boats for going - literally - overseas.


View attachment 43207


Those vulgar, newfangled DC-3s keep whizzing by. Luckily it's not far and soon we cross into France near Dieppe:


View attachment 43208


This is the worst bit for British passengers; they won't feel truly happy again till they get back into their own Empire (Alexandria, Egypt on this particular route). Imperial Airways really did put out reassuring publicity to the effect that there would be British officials at EVERY stop and 'no need ever to deal with foreigners' - !
 
Let's have a look at the interior of one of these things:


View attachment 43209


(You probably had to bring your own flapper)

We trundle over various places in France including Beauvais, a name which sends a chill down the spine of every airship affecionado... One of my old books is called The Romance of a Modern Airway and it has an introduction by Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation. He was killed near Beauvais in the R101 Disaster, along with Lord Thomson, Air Minister, and many other passengers and crew, on October 5 1930. The book is so ancient that it predates the HP-42s (which flew between 1929 and the Second World War), having pictures of the earlier DH-66 Hercules aircraft flying this route.


View attachment 43210


If you look carefully you can see the Eiffel Tower in that picture. (Paris looks a lot better without any of its hideous postwar buildings.) At this point I was trying to work out where Le Bourget was. I consoled myself with the thought that if Lindbergh could find it after 33 and a half hours crossing the Atlantic, I could probably manage.

I did, and found a nice sort of concrete runway there:


View attachment 43211


And some interesting French aircraft which you may like to identify:


View attachment 43212


View attachment 43213


View attachment 43214
 
AndyG43 said:
:icon_lol:



Not often you hear hear the words "nice" and "Croydon" in the same sentence!!

Brilliant Ralf, loved that whole thing!
Click to expand...


Yes, the modern Croydon is pretty grim. Have often driven past the old airport on the way to board some boring Airbus at Gatwick, that bit of Croydon is still a little bit romantic! ;)
 
Yes, nice that the old Aerodrome Hotel is still there and not been flattened and redeveloped; and the Heron outside is a nce touch.
 
The Romance of a Modern Airway suggests a couple of 1920s air routes across Europe, either straight through France to its Mediterranean coast around Marseilles, or a more scenic trip down the Rhine and the Danube via Vienna and through the Balkans to Salonica. That's in northern Greece, so it's a short hop down to Athens, gateway to the East. The book gets vague and burbles on about all the lovely scenery you'd see from your 'Airliner', but the fact is, it wouldn't have belonged to Imperial Airways. Le Bourget was as far as they could take you, having no further overflying rights in France or Italy.

So if you had bought a ticket to go further east: to Egypt, the Middle East, India, the Far East or Australia, in the 1930s, the next stage was by train from Paris to Brindisi in the far south of Italy. (No doubt it was a very fine train too, preferably without Poirot or Miss Marple or anyone getting murdered in luxury.)

Imperial were, however, allowed by Mussolini to keep these at Brindisi:

View attachment 43314

I've been a bit lazy about plonking one into the sea there, so we're going from the Seaplane base at Syracuse, Sicily, a bit further south and west. This aeroplane - I mean flying boat - makes the HP-42 look like a Formula 1 car and will take about four hours to get to Athens.

The old cross-section from Imperial's own ads at the time has proved popular above, so here's the Scipio equivalent:


View attachment 43315

Note the anchor. With Active Camera we can also have a look inside the (rather Spartan) flightsim one:


View attachment 43316


A pretty dawn takeoff:


View attachment 43317


We are now heading (very slowly) across the Ionian Sea.


View attachment 43318


The computer suggested 11,500 feet and there was plenty of time to climb to that altitude. In pre-pressurised days they often stayed as low as about 3000 - it gets very cold up there. A primitive autopilot will keep you on course (a heading of about 80 degrees), but the aircraft has a tendency to pitch up a little, so you need to watch your attitude all the time.

Taking another look round inside I noticed the little windows obviously put in so the crew could keep an eye on its wings:


View attachment 43319

Of course that's not a prop you can see - they're above - it's one of the floats.


View attachment 43320

Built-in headwind, or what?

Better go to (reality) work now, more this evening...
 
Spotted a private aircraft below:

View attachment 43365

Eventually we sight the Ionian island of Kefallonia:


View attachment 43366

This is the one in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a quite good novel which was made into a terrible film. No way would any Greek girl have an affair with an Italian officer - in WW2 the Greeks defeated the Italians, but then had that despised and beaten enemy imposed on them by the Germans (who they dislike even more - though always very welcoming to tourists of all nations).


View attachment 43367


Approaching Greece over Kefallonia we'd veered a little too far north, so I altered course slightly towards Zante, southernmost of the Ionians. We see the Greek mainland and I suddenly realise why we needed that 11,500 feet...


View attachment 43368

Corfu (Kerkyra in Greek), to the north opposite the Albanian coast, is still the most famous Ionian island, despite Captain Corelli. Unbelievably all of them were British in the first half of the 19th Century, having been captured from the French in the Napoleonic Wars. Prime Minister Gladstone liked the Greeks - and the Royal Navy didn't need any bases there - so they had a plebiscite and the Ionians voted to leave the British Empire and join Greece.

We pass the Isthmus of Corinth with the town of that name which was a major player along with Athens, Sparta and Thebes back in the glory days of Ancient Greece:


View attachment 43369


No doubt they had a lot of power from controlling the narrow bit between Athens and Sparta to the south on the Peloponnese (today it's a truckstop above the modern Canal).

Here's the Saronic Gulf and I'd better begin our descent down towards Athens:


View attachment 43370


There is the Piraeus, port of Athens, up ahead:


View attachment 43371


You can see someone landing at Hellenikon, the old Athens Airport.

I've often touched down and flown from there in 1950s/60s flightsims (and 1970s/80s reality), but this time we're going to try to land in the harbour...

A lot of shipping there, but I didn't collide with anything, though it might have been more realistic to line up and come down parallel to the coast. Just managed to stop in time before we ran out of sea!


View attachment 43373


The modern airport is Eleftherios Venizelos (named after the statesman who was Prime Minister of Greece at the time we're arriving there), but the main Athens airport in the 1930s was Dekhelia, not yet Hellenikon. Many airports in Greece and her islands today were originally Axis or Allied airfields from WW2.
 
It's funny being parked in an aircraft and seeing ships all around you rather than other aeroplanes!

View attachment 43690


So we have made it to Athens where Monsieur Venizelos is in charge (the British always called him that, presumably because he was foreign and they didn't know any Greek so they used the only other language they could vaguely remember from school; Madame Mao was another, more recent, even more inappropriate, example).

I've decided to switch to something a bit faster for our next leg down to Alexandria:


View attachment 43691


These Short S-23s were introduced in 1936, a wonderful thing for British imperial aviation because big flying boats could travel long distances over water, avoiding jealous foreign powers' territory. The doomed R101 had hoped to achieve the same thing: its first stop was supposed to be Egypt (not a flaming hole outside Beauvais).


View attachment 43692


I doubt if these Empire boats really ever went to Athens. Their Mediterranean route would have been a direct Brindisi - Alexandria. Of course what they really wanted to do was get across the Atlantic, still the most important air route in the world.


View attachment 43693


Managed to get her up without hitting any smelly Greek freighters.

If you get a map of the Mediterranean and draw a direct line from Athens to Alexandria, you will notice that before you're halfway there it just passes through an interesting place we have been to before...

But first we must overfly the Cyclades island group, passing the easternmost, Milos:


View attachment 43694


Where the Venus de Milo was once dug up by some lucky Frenchmen. The big one is Milos itself with Kimolos to the left and Polyaigos beyond. The modern airport is on the flat sandy bit in the middle (though I've left it out of GW3, almost certainly one of those WW2 airfields).


View attachment 43695


Thought there'd be plenty of time to take outside view shots, but got a shock when I suddenly realised that our halfway stop was looming up ahead!


View attachment 43696


Yes, you've guessed it, the wonderful island of Crete...
 
:salute: Ralf your knowledge of Greece is remarkable, your taste in aircraft for flying those legs impeccable. The stuff dreams are made of!

Keep it up!

cheers,
Nigel
 
Mirabella

Nigel is going to like this bit...

Warning: Extremely romatic aviation history ahead


Imperial Airways had a flying boat base called Mirabella at Elounda in eastern Crete. Marked X on this jolly map I once bought there:

View attachment 43708


Unfortunately I bought the map on Crete alright, but have never visited Elounda (an omission which will be rectified next time I go anywhere near). Here's a picture from that Romance of a Modern Airway book:


View attachment 43709


There you see our old friend the S-17 at anchor with a three-engined S-8 nearby. Also the Motor Yacht Imperia, more about that below.

And here's my GW3 version, the crest of the mountains looking quite close to the real thing:


View attachment 43710


In the 1930s Imperia was commanded by Captain Francis Grant Pool. When the war started they wisely moved her to Port Said, but Captain Pool stayed on and fought with the legendary Anglo-Cretan resistance. The British commandos were disguised as Cretan peasants, and of course he already spoke the local dialect fluently.



View attachment 43711



After the war they didn't need the flying boat base any more, so M/V Imperia was sold to a couple of British officers in Egypt. In 1946 she was found drifting in the Med with nobody on board; the new owners had vanished, Mary Celeste style.


Although there is a bridge there, Spinaloga is really an island. Apparently the water of the harbour where they used to land is so calm that it was very difficult to judge landings properly. The Imperial engineers put nets with ping-pong balls in them on the ends of the aircraft wings. Just before the flying boat hit the water the balls would be released and bounce down, revealing exactly where the surface was (!)


Unfortunately this trick didn't always work, and there was a fatal accident there in '36. Here's a link to an interesting article about that...


...around the time they were burying the unfortunate crew, they fished the mail out and it continued (stampless) on its way:


View attachment 43707

(By the way, if you're wondering how the British managed to get a flying boat base there, I expect M. Venizelos, himself a Cretan and as pro-British as Gladstone had been pro-Greek, probably arranged it).
 
Question is: Can I bring the big beautiful S-23 down in that pretty little harbour?


View attachment 43712


Or will it all go SPLAT? It seemed to be a matter of flying a little way along the north coast, past the capital Heraklion, and then turning south to cross that headland and come down on the water before hitting the bridge...


View attachment 43717


There's the headland; I decided to allow about 2000 feet to get over that, though it still looked a bit touch-and-go...

View attachment 43718


Managed to clear it OK, but now of course a rapid descent was needed for the final bit:


View attachment 43724


As mentioned above, it is unlikely that anything bigger than an S-17 ever came in here; the S-23s need a good mile to take off and set down, and are happiest somewhere like Southampton Water (where they originally came from).


View attachment 43725

Another beautiful place to die, though I'd rather not...

View attachment 43726

Good show. Pink gins all round (though there's still getting back out of here to come of course).


View attachment 43727


(Incidentally, if you do want to try a Pink Gin just put a few drops of Angostura Bitters in with a normal Gin & Tonic - ignore any advice to simply dilute with water, stick to tonic, it's delicious (add ice, but forget the lemon, to taste).)


View attachment 43728
 
Ralf Roggeveen said:
...

I doubt if these Empire boats really ever went to Athens. Their Mediterranean route would have been a direct Brindisi - Alexandria. Of course what they really wanted to do was get across the Atlantic, still the most important air route in the world.
...
Click to expand...

Hi,

I'm not sure I can agree with you.

Athens was a major stopping point for the Empire flying boats network. After flying was accelerated (with very early morning take-off and quick turnaround) it was the first overnight stop on the way to Alexandria.

The standard Empire boats had a hard time getting to Marseilles non-stop with a significant payload. The weren't really designed for long-range travel, rather for bus-stop tours with a lot of short hops a every day.

But this was what the boats were designed for - delivering airmail to the Empire, to Africa, Asia and Australia, to be specific. Transatlantic service was not really possible; it required in-flight refuelling and was limited to a few mail-only flights before the service was shut down because of WWII. The G-class flying boats were designed for transatlantic service.

But anyway, thanks for your interesting tour and I like to follow it. First time I see a pic of Imperia, by the way.

For anyone who's interested in the Empire Flying Boats, here's a link: http://www.users.waitrose.com/~mbcass/Flying Empires.pdf

Best regards,
Volker
 
Fascinating to think that for a few months, the HP42 could be seen in service alongside the DH91 - quite a contrast.

MikeW
 
:salute: Thanks Volker, I am sure you're right and glad that it isn't unrealistic to take an S-23 from Athens, though I doubt if they really ever stopped at Mirabella. Certainly the mail was the most important thing, as it was for US (and French) airlines developing at this time. Most of Imperial's passengers were government officials, the cost of flying being enormous compared with postwar. Mail and government people need to move quickly; the rich travelled slowly and in much more comfort by sea.


Development of Short flying boats:


S-23 C Class 1936 (Bristol Pegasus XC engines) Range: 760 miles/1,225 km

S-26 G Class 1939 (Bristol Hercules IV engines) Range: 3,200 miles/5,150 km

S-25/V Sandringham 4 1946 (Pratt & Whitney R-1830-90D Twin Wasp engines)
Range: 2,410 miles/3,880 km

S-45 Solent 2 1946 (Bristol Hercules 637 engines) Range: 2,040 miles/3,290 km


The 1952 Saunders Roe SR-45 Princess with its 10 Bristol Proteus 600 turbo-props had a range of 5,500 miles/8,850 km



Coming up: The bright lights of Alexandria... :icon_eek:
 
The Romance book contains the useful information that From Athens your aerial liner is steered on a 230 mile flight over the wonderful Greek Archipelago to the Island of Crete...

At Mirabella lies the Imperial Airways motor-yacht Imperia, to which you are taken by launch in order to enjoy lunch.
After this, re-embarking again in your winged ship, you will fly 379 miles over the blue Mediterranean to Alexandria, taking tea while high in the air...

My copy is inscribed
From Mother & Father To Jack with love Xmas 1930 ​

It seems unlikely that Mother, Father or Jack could ever have made such a flight, though the book will have helped to make all of them "air-minded", which is what the doomed Sir Sefton Brancker and Lord Thomson wanted.

Turning round in the harbour we can see the causeway linking the island of Spinaloga to Crete proper:

View attachment 43866

I estimated that if we could be airborne by the time we were parallel to the last house in Elounda, we would be able to turn right and climb out of the harbour entrance...

View attachment 43867

Success

View attachment 43868

A good view of the whole of Mirabella:

View attachment 43869

Now we needed to gain altitude rapidly to clear the Cretan mountains:

View attachment 43870

This was achieved, but there was briefly very bad turbulence above the peaks

View attachment 43871

We leave Crete behind us and I'm quite pleased with myself

View attachment 43872

Then, to my horror I realised that we'd left at 5 o'clock and wouldn't reach Africa till it was dark! The S-17 would not have flown in darkness, but thought it would probably be OK in this thing. Gave myself an ETA of about 19.00 hrs...
 
Sure enough, twilight falls...

View attachment 43873

Time to put the lights on

View attachment 43874

We could have stayed at around 3000 over the sea, but the S-23 seemed to be happiest somewhere between 6 and 8000 feet. You can use the primitive Sperry autopilot to maintain heading quite well, but need to watch pitch all the time.

View attachment 43875

Talking of pitch, it was soon pitch dark. I was straining my eyes ahead to spot the African coast, though knew it wouldn't be far below the 32nd parallel.

View attachment 43876


Tried not to think about the Lady Be Good, although presumably a big city like Alexandria should, in peacetime, be lit up as was the proverbial Christmas Tree...

View attachment 43877

I have never landed at Alexandria airport, though flown over it often enough on the way to Cairo. Of course this isn't going to the air port, the sea one will be our destination, like it was at Athens.

This old picture (from the future!) of the time I took (will take?) that Comet 1 down to Johannesberg proved useful:

View attachment 43878

It was just a matter of making the descent nice 'n' gently, putting down in the shelter of the harbour and not hitting any ships (or small invisible boats for that matter). Powerful landing lights proved very, very useful here.

View attachment 43879

We made it safely and the launch came out to pick up the passengers and take them, no doubt, to the finest hotel in Alex and their choice of cocktails...

View attachment 43880


While their aircraft anchored for the night!
 
Hi Ralph,

cool pictures.

I was referring to the Brindisi-Alexandria leg, by the way. Athens was a routine stop and M/V Imperia at Mirabella bay provided only radio contact and fuel for unscheduled landings in adverse weather. No routine stop any more once the biplanes were phased out.

Yes, a ticket to Australia cost about as much as a small house.

Try to land in daylight, whenever possible. While night landings were possible with the help of a flare path, it appears that it was avoided whenever possible. Before dawn take-off was routine, though.

Best regards,
Volker
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top