Imperial Airdays are here again

I cant be sure but i think the old RAF Sharjar is now Umm Al Quwain, some mile north of the present Sharjah International Airport and on the coast, its in FS9 but is only one concrete strip, long enough for a Hunter though.
intresting subject and ive already found a few good pics-----If know one else is intrested, i could be tempted :jump:
cheers ian
 
ian elliot said:
I cant be sure but i think the old RAF Sharjar is now Umm Al Quwain, some mile north of the present Sharjah International Airport and on the coast, its in FS9 but is only one concrete strip, long enough for a Hunter though.
intresting subject and ive already found a few good pics-----If know one else is intrested, i could be tempted :jump:
cheers ian
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RAF Sharjah got absorbed by the town, the old runway is now King Abdul Aziz Street - as this website shows the old control tower and some of the buildings are now used ofr what looks like an interesting museum.

Ian, I hope you find the temptation too much to resist; the best I could hope to do would be a basic AFCAD, and I really need somewhere to fly my Hunters from & the Shackleton's looking for Nikko. :salute:
 
Well, we can't leave the 1938 passengers stuck in Gwadar; time to get them to Karachi. Once again the HP wanted to trundle along the coast taking several hours to cross a dull desert and a lot of even more boring sea, so I decided that there was a quicker and rather more interesting way to get there:


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Thanks to the great Belov the Seaplane port (BIKS) and Air(ship) Port (BIKA) can be put into British India in GW3 and we'll have some fine sights to see when we get there!

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We leave from that famous - then otherwise empty - bay of Gwadar...

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Inspired by reading Frater's Beyond the Blue Horizon, Robert Bluffield has done a (2009) book called Imperial Airways, the birth of the British airline industry 1914 - 1940. The text is, unfortunately, slightly dull with a great deal about management organisation and how various routes were worked out. There's also an emphasis on Africa (not much about India), which is a pity.

Back in the '30s, here's the first sight of where our destination will be found:

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And there's the coast in an outside view:

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Today you'd still be in Pakistan, but leaving the desert/highland province of Baluchistan and coming to rich and fertile Sindh and the great River Indus which flows into the Arabian Sea just south of Karachi.

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Spot the difference! In the 1840s this country was ruled by a sinister oligarchy of Amirs who controlled it the usual way - through terror and the barrel of a gun (a lot of guns) - with Karachi as a sort of huge gay brothel that they used for R & R. Obviously the British - who had just defeated the Sikhs to the south - couldn't allow that! Young Lt Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) was sent in on a deep undercover mission...

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Burton's report on what was going on in Karachi was so shocking that it remains Top Secret (I believe the Foreign Office have kept one copy, but there's still no public access).

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The story goes that after General Napier had conquered the place he sent the one word telegram PECCAVI (Latin: I have Sinned) back to London. It seems unlikely, however, that there was a telegraph office in Karachi in 1843... Someone just quipped that he might have done so.
 
Splashdown!

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Gently does it to come to a stop on the water. These boats need a very long run to get enough power to take off, but will stop relatively quickly once you're back down.

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There's a fine line-up of somewhat classic ships here...

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And a couple of our fellow-flying boats in harbour:

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There is another C-Class, and is the other one a G? It's in TEAL livery, so must have come up from the other side of the planet - quite a thought.

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The Imperial non-flying boat comes out to disembark passengers and crew.

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You can see the other C Class which was busy refuelling from a ship's oiler alongside.

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And the classic ship show - which includes a Dutch one, probably on his way to or from Batavia with a cargo of Bols, or bibles, or something.

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As one of the sillier female passengers (daughter of a very high-ranking Indian Army officer I believe) remarked, stepping down into the boat in unsuitable shoes: 'It's all so utterly, utterly romantic. Simply TOO divine!'
 
We were talking about Aden/Khormaksar and Andy posted a marvellous link to that site with the visit to the Gulf Aviation Museum in Sharjah, so I got their DC-3 out in fs9:

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Ian Elliot's Khormaksar and a nice default Gooneybird repaint by Muhammad Al-Khalifa (the only Gulf Aviation flyable I've ever managed to find - we need more!). Here's the little civil terminal at Aden with some nice early '60s aircraft crowding round:

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On the subject of DC-3s, there's also an interesting letter, with amazing photographs (p.66), in the October Aeroplane. Peter Bleeck, who sent the letter, witnessed an East West Airlines one that ditched in a golf course lake just outside Sydney in 1957. Here's the MAAM Sim Dak in their livery:

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(It was actually slightly different in the late '50s, Australian flag on the tail).

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There it is at the '50s Kingsford-Smith, hopefully not heading for that lake.

Back in Karachi in 1938 we've motored over to the land airport. If we'd been there last year we might have seen...

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An RAF type that would have been spotted at some of our stopovers in the late '20s was this, the DH-9:


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Here he is going out on patrol:


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You no doubt noticed the airship tower in the background - and the hangar which was then - rather unbelievably - the largest building in India. Of course they were built specially for the poor old R101; both now scapped - though we still have its shed here in England at Cardington.

Anyway, we'll be doing our next leg in this:

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The Armstrong Whitworth XV Atalanta. This one is actually in Indian Trans Continental livery, two of Imperial's were transferred to them. Don't worry, there'll be plenty of time after our dawn takeoff to look at it in daylight ...
 
This is a picture the flightdeck interior of the Atalanta which I took at the other end of this flight:

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Some interesting aircraft could be made out by the dawn's early light as we taxyed round at Karachi:

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Is it a DH-66 loading up there? Famous for 'flying the Furrow' with the Cairo - Baghdad mail.

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Don't envy the person who got that 1920 Fokker all this way from Holland...

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...I've had trouble trying to fly those F.IIs round Holland and north Germany, let alone all this way.

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As for the Atlanta, it's not the world's fastest or most aerodynamic, but you can make a reasonable 110-20 knots in her.

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We are going to Udaipur in Gujarat, flying just north of the Tropic of Cancer. Imperial may have flown passengers and mail direct to Jodhpur, while aircraft with the range, like Amelia's Electra, went all the way to Allahabad, halfway across northern India; but this is the scenic route to Delhi.

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For a long time we overfly the huge salt marsh with a name to conjure with: the Rann of Kuchchh!

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This is now the border between India and Pakistan, as heavily militarized as in the better-known mountainous region to the north. Indian MiGs shot down a Pakistani Navy aircraft here in 1996, an event somewhat confusingly known as the Atlantique Incident, after the type, a Breguet Atlantique, that the unfortunate Pakistanis were alleged to have violated Indian airspace in (looking for Indian subs in the salt perhaps?). Since both countries are members of the Commonwealth, this is almost as silly as NATO allies Greece and Turkey still being constantly at daggers drawn! The 21st Century is the one that matters...
 
Interesting to see the DH-9 over in Karachi. Not only were they flying there in the late '20s, some also made it well into the '30s - albeit with the Afghan Air Force, who continued to use the type until replacing it with more modern equipment, the Hawker Hart in 1939, supplemented by some IMAM Ro-37s not much later.

Both latter types remained in frontline service with the Afghan air force for some years, until being replaced by something more modern - Russian build MiG-17s and IL-28s in 1957, part of a package deal which also saw the Russians upgrade Kabul Airport (while at the same time, the Americans rebuilt Kandahar). There must be some irony in there somewhere, given how familiar both airports were to become to them in later years...

Most famously, though, a couple DH-9s ended up with the Maharaja of the Birkaner State in Rajasthan. The ones there probably aren't them, though, as by that time already, the 'Elephant Stable Bombers' had already been half-eaten by termites, with their engines probably being used for local irrigation projects. Even so, they were largely forgotten about until their accidental rediscovery a decade or so ago: now one of them is at Duxford, while another one is being returned to flight...
 
Okami said:
Interesting to see the DH-9 over in Karachi. Not only were they flying there in the late '20s, some also made it well into the '30s - albeit with the Afghan Air Force, who continued to use the type until replacing it with more modern equipment, the Hawker Hart in 1939, supplemented by some IMAM Ro-37s not much later.

Both latter types remained in frontline service with the Afghan air force for some years, until being replaced by something more modern - Russian build MiG-17s and IL-28s in 1957, part of a package deal which also saw the Russians upgrade Kabul Airport (while at the same time, the Americans rebuilt Kandahar). There must be some irony in there somewhere, given how familiar both airports were to become to them in later years...

Most famously, though, a couple DH-9s ended up with the Maharaja of the Birkaner State in Rajasthan. The ones there probably aren't them, though, as by that time already, the 'Elephant Stable Bombers' had already been half-eaten by termites, with their engines probably being used for local irrigation projects. Even so, they were largely forgotten about until their accidental rediscovery a decade or so ago: now one of them is at Duxford, while another one is being returned to flight...
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And let us not forget the famous Afghan 'scrapyard', where they discovered the Hinds and Ro.37s back around 2004; hopefully we will see some nice restorations in the future. The Shuttleworth Hiind was also an Afghan example, it is a wonderful experience to see that beautiful aircraft taking off & displaying at Old Warden.
 
The King of Afghanistan also had a fantastic collection of cars, many of which survived and have been rescued and restored. I believe the wretched Taliban actually sold some of them through proper classic car channels, no doubt spending the money on closing schools and executing doctors.

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But yes, the DH9 was the RAF tribal control aircraft par excellence, used right across the Middle East and up into the North West frontier. Nobody ever flew in one without the famous B*ll*ck Chitty, a piece of paper written in the local language (probably Pashtu on the NW Frontier) explaining that if this man got back alive and, er, in one piece, his rescuers would be well rewarded by the grateful Government of India. This did somewhat rely on (a) meeting someone who could actually read any language, and (b) not being found first by anyone whose village you had just bombed. Unbelievably, however, it did work. I have an account by Major Charles G. Barker of being shot down by Afridis in 1919 (possibly in an early DH9, he doesn't say) and getting back OK, though they were lucky that one of the villagers spoke 'Hindustani' (i.e. Hindi). They stole everything, but the British managed to hang onto their sidearms - the Afridis may have got the Lewis gun. One nice detail: I had the consolation of seeing one fellow drink the contents of my iodine bottle, thinking it was brandy! (Thrilling Flights, 1935).

No danger of any of that down here in the civilized south:

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We overfly the Indus (fine example of an Oxbow Lake there for school geography lessons). Older readers may remember the Comet in its Round the World flight going over the Mouths of the Ganges on the other side of India a few years ago.

After that this side there's a lot of flat, barren territory, probably only good for salt.

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[Having to resize these pix manually, so will switch off for a while (breakfast!) and resume later...]
 
The next big change in scenery takes place when you cross the boundary between Gujarat and Rajahstan:

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It looks like this on your Six...

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...and that at your Twelve o'Clock:

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We also see highlands again, the southern foothills of the Aravalli Range, which we're going to have get over:

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I think 6,000 will allow clearance...

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It was easily enough, and I also managed to spot Udaipur airfield up ahead:

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Nice green fields - it could almost be Oxfordshire!
 
Beautiful Udaipur is known as the 'City of Lakes' (no doubt that'd be the name of an aeroplane too if it was in Pakistan), but I didn't notice any coming in to land.

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The Atalanta's quite easy to slow and bring down. Probably the most important thing flying something like that if fuel economy: make sure all three tanks are full and be sure to thin the mixture when you reach cruise altitude, it doesn't have much range.

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It's very quiet - no other aircraft, civil or military (don't think it was an RAF base in the '30s).

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Went and parked near this RAF-style tower...

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...let the passengers out and put the flag up.
 
Ralf Roggeveen said:
It's very quiet - no other aircraft, civil or military (don't think it was an RAF base in the '30s).
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It wouldn't have been. The Udaipur district was one of the so-called "princely states" that maintained a high degree of autonomy under the Raj; it didn't become part of India proper until after Independence, when Nehru used it as part of the strategy to unify the country after the horrors of Partition.
 
Yes, the Princely States did have a good deal of autonomy, including small armed forces, though British advisers always kept a careful eye on them. All the Maharajahs had fantastic car collections and one or two, notably Umaid Singh in Jodhpur, had aircraft as well! I think that the earlier Imperial flights were Karachi - Jodhpur - Jaipur, but we've missed Jodhpur (also famous for horses & the riding trousers of the same name that some women look very good in even without a horse), and will now take the Atalanta from Udaipur to Jaipur, before reaching our Delhi destination.

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All the countryside all the way on this leg is extremely flat and fertile.

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We started to see a bit more traffic too; that was a Vega (probably belonging to one of those Indian princes).

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I was going to stick to 3000 feet, but they insisted on 3300, presumably because of our height above sea level.

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Anyway, there definitely weren't going to be any mountains.

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We are in - or over - the province of Rajasthan throughout this flight which takes a couple of hours.

I have left some anachronistic Cessnas doing circuits at Jaipur:

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Here's one coming in, which brings back memories of flying lessons real and virtual:

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It's quite rightly a very busy airport in the '30s - at that time it was actually bigger than Delhi.

And we manouever the Atalanta round to land at that East - West facing runway:

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Found the airfield...

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...and began our descent towards it.

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Not having seen much other traffic for thousands of miles, it now started to get in the way a bit!

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Was supposed to follow one of the Cessnas in on final, but didn't like to slow down and let him go ahead for fear of stalling...

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...Decided to go in front of him and ignore the wrath of ATC (I knew they'd order me to Go around). What I didn't realise was that there was some nitwit just sitting there at the end of the runway - nobody was aware of anyone trying to take off. I did get the Go-around, but just managed to avoid him and brought the Atalanta safely down...

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...after all, we are Imperial Airways (or at least an important subsidiary of theirs).

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Went and parked by a Ford Trimotor which makes interesting size comparison. The Ford could carry about 15 passengers - anyone know how many the Atalanta could take?

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We can say farewell to it now, as I've found something else rather interesting to take us on the final leg to Delhi.
 
Ralf Roggeveen said:
Went and parked by a Ford Trimotor which makes interesting size comparison. The Ford could carry about 15 passengers - anyone know how many the Atalanta could take?
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It could carry uop to 17 passengers, but Imperial usually restricted it to 9 on the Indian routes, and used some of the capacity for freight.
 
The old Imperial cutaway-type pictures have proved popular here, so this is the one for the Atalanta:

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Promised to get to Delhi in something interesting, so now it's time to go in this:

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It is, of course, the Avro Ten, British licence-built Fokker F-VII 3m.

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Imperial did have two of them: G-ABLU Apollo (which crashed in Belgium in 1938) and this one, G-AASP Achilles.

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Achilles was chartered to BOAC at its inception, but destroyed by enemy action in 1940 (on the ground in England I seem to remember).

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You may have noticed that the weather has taken a turn for the worse...

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Thought it might be interesting to try to fly in Monsoon conditions...

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Famous last words. I just made it, but there was at least one very hairy moment, as you shall see.

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Useful dials there outside on the engines that they refer to. Some large aircraft of a slightly earlier period (including airships) actually had an engineer sitting with them throughout the flight, so this is a technological advance.
 
Here's a chap going to work in WW1:

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Join the Airforce, see the world. Try not to fall off and hit it.

Anyway, at first the Monsoon weather seemed OK, just a bit drizzly really and you could easily climb above it.

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Then it got very nasty indeed...

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There was a frightful thunderstorm.

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I tried to get a picture of the poor old Avro/Fokker being lit up by lightning (there was plenty of that), but was too busy grappling with the controls! Of course it's normally very stable with that huge cantilever wing, but the same friendly wing that holds you up can easily be shoved down by unforeseen pressure from above!

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Fortunately we had reached 9000 feet (the height chosen by Low Altitude Airways) when the worst weather struck, so there was room to recover.

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But it was knocked about quite badly and we lost 3000 feet in seconds, so I had to climb back up. Luckily the storm seemed to disappear as fast as it had arisen.

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Spotted Willy's HP-42 trundling sedately along - he must have missed what I just went through.

Most of the time - about an hour and a half between Jaipur and Delhi - we were above the cloud and you could even see breaks in it and make out the fields below.

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An Indian colleague at work tells me that the Monsoon is really in July/August, but it seemed worth trying to fly a '30s aircraft in more difficult conditions. I doubt if they would have risked it in one of these, though the immortal Amelia did take her Electra through similar storms (the rainfall was so strong that it stripped paint off her wings - !).
 
Despite the dodgy weather, saw (and heard) quite a lot of traffic as we got closer to Delhi.

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Nice Piper Cub - first made by Taylor from 1930, but they became Piper Aircraft Corp. in '37.

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Still in rain most of the time, but the storm died down and there were breaks in the cloud with sun shining through.

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It's flat and fertile Rajahstan between Jaipur and Delhi, the mountains are to the north.

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Delhi had been the Moghul capital of India, though the British ruled from Calcutta until New Delhi (still capital of the Republic of India of course) was specially built in the early 20th Century. The Moghuls had set a useful imperialist precedent, also being foreign (originally Persian) and having a different religion (Islam) from the majority Hindu population.

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(Hope I'll be able to spot the airport)...

Unbelievably most of India was conquered by the private East India Company between the mid-18th and mid-19th Centuries, though the British Government did appoint a Governor General. The HEIC (Honourable East India Co.) was so powerful that it had its own army (mostly high caste Bengali soldiers with white officers, a few all-white units) and navy and was able to sub-contract units of the British state army to come over and help them conquer the place. The huge subcontinent was politically divided into Presidencies: Bombay (west), Madras (south) and Bengal (north).

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By 1857 the Indians in the north had had enough and the famous Indian Mutiny took place. This is sometimes called 'the First Indian Rebellion' or 'War of Resistance', but it definitely was a mutiny of the (mainly Hindu) HEIC army in shaky alliance with the last vestiges of (Muslim) Moghul power and some Hindu rulers. Other 'native troops', notably Sikhs and Gurkhas, were quite happy to help the British put down the rebels!

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Some British women and children were killed, leading to savage reprisals. Interestingly, Muslim rebels were executed by being tied to gun barrels and blasted to bits: a terrible death for them since they believe that you enter the afterlife in the exact condition you leave this one. Modern 'suicide bombers' are therefore ignorant of and blaspheming against their own beliefs.

When the British had reconquered the area around Delhi the East India Company was abolished and the Government took over. The Governor General became Viceroy and Prime Minster Disraeli had the nice idea of appointing Queen Victoria Empress of India (Kaisir-i-Hind). It should be noted that although India was an Empire (the Raj), it was NOT a colony, so the British didn't try to 'settle' the place as they, and other European powers, did elsewhere on the planet. When the time came to go, 90 years after the Mutiny, they only had to remove military forces and a few administrators. A handful of British people involved in trade and industry (especially tea planters) remained to work for the new Republic, but most knew that it was time to go back to Blighty.
 
More beautiful images & more fascinating history, thanks.

The Indian Mutiny was a pivotal point in British involvement on the subcontinent; after the Rebellion Britain dropped the pretext that her involvement was still largely commercial and it became an overtly Imperial occupation. In the 18th and early 19th century relations between the British and the Indians had been closer, with a degree of assimilation (one in three men married Indian women); after the Mutiny this was impossible, and the cliche of the British Raj grew quickly.

If anybody is interested in reading more on the subject, I can highly recommend the books by William Dalrymple & Geoffrey Moorhouse.
 
Thanks Andy, I'd endorse both those writers. Dalrymple has written The White Mughals about interracial marriage between British and Indians before the Mutiny (fine if the Brits were important and the Indians were women from noble families) and The Last Mughal, a biography of Bahadur Shah, the aged claimant to the throne put back into 'power' by the Mutineers. Another very good writer on British India was Michael Edwardes who did a single volume history of the Mutiny, Red Year - and there's a good one by Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny. All accounts reckon the Raj was a lot less fun after more British women arrived there!

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Worried about whether I'd spot the airport in these conditions.

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We were basically flying NNE, sometimes due North, and it was around 17.00 when we got there.

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I made a mistake and did a flightplan to to Indira Gandhi International (VIDP), the modern airport of Delhi. It shouldn't really be in GW3 at all, since it can only trace its history back to an RAF base of 1941.

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The correct airport would have been Safdarjung (VIDD) which was Willingdon, the original Delhi International. Sanjay Gandhi, one of Indira's sons and chosen successor, was killed trying to loop the loop at Safdarjung. After that his brother Rajiv (an airline pilot!) was groomed to be Prime Minister instead, but he was assassinated by an exploding bunch of flowers thrust into his face by a Sri Lankan woman. His Italian widow with the unlikely name Sonia, now leads the Congress Party, though she modestly draws the line at being PM herself. Indira was, of course, herself gunned down by one of her own Sikh bodyguards, which brings to mind the wise old Roman question: QUIS CUSTODET IPSOS CUSTODES?*

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I am thinking of writing (quite a long) book called Airports Named After People Who Were Shot... It might even be possible to do a Round the World flight visiting each one in turn...

* = Er...What Security do you have to check on your Security?

 
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