It's happened to you...

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Aha! Forgot about the LOT Convairs - (that may help explain why I made up Pollot Airways). You wouldn't love what they've done to 21st Century reality Heathrow, Tom!

Let's get back to the far more preferable aviation world you've created back in 1959...

Irish Fokker Friendship in action, Birmingham - Dublin:

And more of those fat-headed Carvairs, as Tom says, at Southend (EGMC):

Classic Silver City Bristol Freighter doing St Gatien - Southampton:

And here are the visiting Pan Am Clippers who seem to have been somewhat sidelined at Heathrow in those days:

Closer look at that 707:

And the miraculous sight (at last!) of the Tupolev from Amsterdam following us to London:

Worth a second glance:

Now, as promised, the unmarked MercAir DC-3 on a wonderful flight St Denis de l'Hotel - Durham, Tees Valley*:

Don't worry Willy, your secret is safe with me. Also approaching the British coast, this attractive Swiss Miss:

A CV-440 from Geneva, Cointrin. Then TT caught this coming in to land on 9R:

LANDER

*If only Roger Whitaker had known the name of the airport, then he wouldn't have sung "Watching the boats go down on the Tyne" (which is in Newcastle) in I've gotta leave ol' Durham Town. This will be Chapter 2 of Ralf Roggeveen's Book of Pop Music Geographical Blunders (after Chapter 1: The Isle of Greece).

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Decided to follow that lander all the way down. Here is a better view of it:

One of those BEA Pionairs, as they rebranded the good old Gooneybird:

We hitched a lift on one from Hamburg to Berlin if you remember. She got her flaps down a long way from touchdown:

See the two white chimneys below the port wing? Battersea Power Station again! Incidentally, when I say 'she', that's not just the aircraft, but the pilot was female, which you could tell by her voice on the radio.

Of course there were no women pilots in airlines in this period, and hardly any female Air Traffic Controllers either. You can do stuff with Edit Voicepack that eliminates women's voices for more '50s realism, but even I haven't gone to that extreme (I rather like 'the (default) bossy one' & 'the sexy one').

She wasn't a brilliant pilot, as it bounced a few times on Niner Right...

...but she got it down safely enough. It's worth using TT to watch things like this just to learn correct proceedures. She turned off the runway at the earliest possible opportunity before going in search of her parking spot.

That included going right past us (we were in the background to at least one other TT picture above as you may have noticed):

(Yeah, I noticed that our rudder needed centering). This Alitalia Viscount had to wait while she went by:

From Jersey in the Channel Islands by the way. And I'm afraid she didn't park very well at the other end of our row...

...I'd definitely have straightened it out, but still.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Here's a shot of the row from my end and you can still see how badly she parked:

Nice AIR-INDIA Connie coming in (plus Battersea bl**dy Power Station again):

I cannot believe that even the French named a postwar aircraft after the Vichy Collabo Prime Minster Pierre Laval, but here it is:

(Please tell me I'm wrong, but a rough equivalent would be the United States calling a warship the USS Benedict Arnold, or perhaps the British having a Sir Oswald Moseley. No, I've got it, the Norwegians naming something Vidkun Quisling - that's equivalent, the guy was executed as a traitor.)

Anyway, here's a general view of the Terminal building (Heathrow now has five):

And a longshot of Vincent with a Lufthansa airliner coming in to land on 9R in the background:

Then there's usually a final one of us parked safely in our spot:

Thought you might also be interested in this little book that is exactly contemporary:

And this is it's Heathrow page:

Note that it was always just called London Airport in those days - come to think of it, I can remember that.

Perhaps the best fs picture of all from there, however, was this one shown a long time ago when we first flew over in the DC-7:

Well, I promised we'd go back. And almost forgot: The Union Flag of the United Kingdom.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Those Carters had a rather touristy time in London (including Madame Tussaud's) and met up with some other Seventh Day Adventists there. They went to eat at their house in Edgware, North London that evening. My, the food tasted so good. says Mrs C., After eating out as we'd done for so many days and changing cooks for each meal for four weeks, a good American-cooked dinner tasted delicious. She must be the only person ever to go to England and think the food there was better than anywhere else, but still. Admittedly their friends, the Bucys, were from Illinois, hence 'American-cooked'. She does not mention dairy products on this occasion.

The Carters then flew back to Schiphol, but I toyed with the idea of taking them straight to their next European capital, Madrid. I also thought of leaving by night for a change of scene, and of going in a BEA Viscount as it was so much the characteristic aircraft of the time. In the end I decided to go at night by Viscount, but to return to Schiphol first. London - Madrid is rather boring, mostly over the sea, whereas Amsterdam - Madrid is much more interesting, and you'll get to see EHAM by night.

Here's the BEAliner we hitched a lift on:

It's outside the British European Airways building in Old Heathrow - I mean London Airport:

If you want to start from here, select a Gate beginning with "B" (the BOAC row is those beginning "5").

Man, it was dark! They gave complicated instructions:

You still have plenty of time to drive round and enjoy the scenery & AI before final departure:

I was very glad of the purple lines...

Passing the Air India ad, a useful landmark on the way to our runway:

I was so busy fiddling about with unfamiliar takeoff proceedures that there was no time to take any pictures of the moment we left Mother Earth. It climbed at a good speed, but a shallow angle. Got some pix of London by night:

In that one you can make out the famous Tower Bridge. The aircraft was cunningly hiding the Millenium Dome, but here you can see something from the 21st Century, the London Eye:

It's that blue carousel just beneath us. And here's the exit map:

You go back out over the Estuary, but continue almost straight ahead towards the coast of Holland.

 

[Ferry_vO]

Ralf, I still follow your story and I'm glad you posted another update but what are you doing behind your computer..??

.

..


...


....

You have a birthday to celebrate! And not just any, but the big 50!

Happy birthday Ralf!

 

[tgibson]

Hi Ralf,

Happy Birthday!

I doubt if that AF Viscount was really named Pierre Laval - Mike Stevens (who painted most of the AI aircraft) has a wickedly ironic sense of humor. There are others flying about as well...

The Heathrow we modeled was as of 1961, after they had taken two of those runways out of service (we think).

Best Wishes,

Tom Gibson

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Thanks guys. Well, I like to think of 50 as being *halfway* through my life... :ernae:

Relieved to hear that Pierre Laval is one of the great Mike Stevens' gags! He certainly got me, though I had suspected that some AI might not REALLY reflect a REAL aeroplane (and you never know with the French, do you?). To do Laval some justice, I read that he did manage to trick the Germans in several ways, probably making life a bit more bearable for most people in occupied France, and apparently he died quite bravely. He'd taken poison the night before his execution (like Goering), but it didn't work properly, so they revived him enough to be shot... But he looked them straight in the eye, etc.

Oh no! They haven't taken the wheels off that Tupy AGAIN:

He's ended up next to Badly-Parked-Woman; seven visible in the row there, several different nationalities. I can see Swiss, Irish, British, German and Russian - and the other two?

TT found this Pegasus flying Blackpool - Gatwick:

Once went on a Greek ship with my late father named after that flying horse from the legends. Unfortunately, in modern Greek it transliterates to PIGasus, and it was a pretty sh1tty ship, so we didn't mind calling it that.

We cross the English coast, very similar here to Holland and known as East Anglia - they even grow tulips:

Another interesting Viking:

I look up Universal in my 1973 book of World Airline Insignia and a sad little note says: Universal Airlines Inc Ceased operations in May 1972. Despite its being British, we can work out where they were based, however. A not unexpected Belgian:

Time for the approach map to Schiphol:

Heading off to line up for RW22 again. The Dutch coast...

...and we're coming in:

A bit fast, but you'll see what happened soon enough...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

...got it down OK in the right place and at the right time: 22.00, there being an hour's time difference between the UK and continental Europe:

That DC-3, which Willy might know more about, is sneaking off to Bellegarde, somewhere in France. This place must be the closest those Carters had to a home while they were over here, though of course they paid more attention to the cheese dish than to the tarmac:

We were parked in the rather distant corner where that Singhalese Connie was yesterday:

The Russkies appear to have provided another rickety jet to replace the one that went to London and to keep their engineers busy all night:

There's obviously some problem with the wheels. But a Soviet satellite had sent a little (flat-tyred) friend to keep it company:

A look round with Traffic Tools Explorer discovered this Maritime Central going from Prestwick, Scotland - Schwechat, Austria:

And a TSA Swede coming in from Broma...

...safely down:

Plus this fellow-BEAline Viscount G-AOJB Stephen Borough (whoever he was - an explorer? It's the Discovery Class), heading back to London:

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Help! I've installed all the KLM L-749s, but am getting AIRCRAFT INITIALIZATION FAILURE on the later models (late '50s L-749As). Any suggestions how to fix that problem? The plan is, that if I can find one that hadn't in reality been left in storage or leased to Air Ceylon, it might be used to fly down to Madrid this weekend... All suggestions will be gratefully received, something must need adjusting. Does it require a fix I don't know about?

And here they are, sitting around in the dark in late '50s Schiphol:

This corner, where we've been before, was a bit better lit:

It's just the other side of the main terminal building and spotters' veranda:

A general shot of Schiphol by night:

And an overview:

Important aircraft though it was, I wasn't sorry to leave the BEAline Viscount. They move efficiently enough, but make a constant ugly whining sound:

Given the choice, I'd stick to the de Havilland stable and BOAC for a British flight in this period.

Remember?

There will be fun with KLM Connies coming up, but if anyone can help with the Initialization Failures, should be a more historically-accurate choice of airplane!

 

[tgibson]

Hi,

If I install the KLM 1959 texture without doing the L-749A model update (which I can't get at AVSIM right now for some reason) I get an Initialization Failure due to the lack of model.AFR_A and model.AFR_SP_A folders. If I change the lines for these liveries in the plane's aircraft.cfg file to model=AFR and model.AFR_SP then the plane loads OK.

Hope this helps,

Tom Gibson

 

[tgibson]

I found the model update at flightsim.com - look for 749_models_update.zip

Then the plane loads as expected without the cfg file edits.

Hope this helps,

Tom Gibson

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

That problem is now solved, thanks to this advice from Tom. Just a matter of making sure that the file labels & the Config model= codes correspond.

So we were back at EHAM with the Carters:

And, as you'll recall, they'll be going to LEMD, Madrid Barajas, next:

Because I flew the trip before the model fix, went in the 1952 livery on PH-TDN, Vlaardingen:

(Guess those Flemings deserve a mention; the Lion of Flanders is the crest on the plane's nose). The Tupolev's wheels have finally been sorted out too now, I'm glad to report.

It's a 3 hour flight and we left at 08.00:

This will be a good trip for checking out the AI over much of France. Nice red fuel bowser and you can see Jaap's Platformbus there too:

Martin's Air Charter Heron which parks amongst the GAs:

These pictures were useful for comparing the size of the Connie with that Heron:

The Heron took 14-17 passengers with a crew of 2; Constellations carried between 44 and (eventually) 81 passengers with a crew of 6. Then I realised that a better shot could be had by using TT Explorer...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

...and this is it:

(Had to post that section a bit early due to download difficulties).

Anyway, here we are ready to go, waiting by the end of RW1:

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Up and away to what was then the last bastion of Fascism in Europe (unless you count Portugal?):

The new terminal buildings at an early stage of their construction:

My climb in the unfamiliar L-749 wasn't very good at first, it nearly stalled. These big old birds require a fairly shallow angle both of climb and final approach:

But it made it up there without dropping uncontrollably out of the big blue place!

Overflying Rotterdam:

Exit map:

This is a much more entertaining route in terms of AI that we'll encounter than going from Heathrow to Madrid would have been. I realised that we'd cross the whole of Belgium and that the Sabenas would soon be kicking in. Sure enough TT Explorer tells us:

And here's a whole row of them (mostly Convair 440s, down at EBBR Brussels presumably):

Scenery is fairly dull all the way until you get to the Gulf of Gascony on the Atlantic and see the Pyrennes. Most of France turns out to be fairly flat except for the edges and the Massif Central which we won't be seeing this time.

But I'm sure there are thousands of lovely historic villages full of smug British people who sold a tiny house in Basingstoke and bought a vast chateau in Normandy with the proceeds.

So that was the first stage, crossing Belgium:

Didn't that German soldier's wife get something from Belgium?

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Saw 'Boeing' on the Explorer and thought 'Ooh, a 707', but it turned out to be this pretty little Stearman:

Ha! We overfly the cathedral city of Reims:

And its airport LFSR Champagne:

Inevitably the first jet spotted is a Caravelle:

And there's one down on the ground too:

But the British are not to be outdone in snazzy retrojets:

Ciampino back home to Heathrow of course. It was nice to find an old Lebanese friend up here in northern Europe:

Plus our first Algerian (still a French colony, fighting a bloody war of independence at the time):

That's at Paris Orly, flying back to Houari Boumediene (I think Boumediene was a leader of the anti-French war, so it probably wasn't yet called that at the time...) You don't see an Algerian Connie every day, do you? Then this US Seaboard & Western transport which has obviously crossed the Atlantic with great elegance:

And a Britavia - you can't escape those British freighters:

This is where you can have fun with the Seldec book:
EGLK Blackbushe, UK - LFMN Cote d'Azur, South of France
LFGJ Tavaux, France - LFPY Bretigny-sur-Orge
ETND Diepholz, Germany - LFLX Deols, France

O happy band of Anoraks!

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

One from Air Inter, the French internal operator (which my mother had a lot of trouble with a few years later - 1964? - when she + 3 brats missed a connection and had an unexpected night in Paris. Although I was only 3 or 4, can still clearly remember that there was no plug in the hotel bathtub):

OMG! A KLM Viscount!

A quick look round Orly...

...and a glance in the other direction:

Here's an Aigle Azur or Blue Eagle (S'pose Azure Eagle sounds quite good in English):

What is it? A Sud-Ouest or a Nord-Sud or an Est-Nord or something? And the inevitable mysterious MercAir Gooneybird sneaking by (to Bellegarde):

Chateauroux below:

Royal Air Maroc (an airline I have experienced in reality):

Casablanca? (GMMM, no FM in the book, MF is Sidi Ifni) - Provence. Airnautic:

Blagnac - Le Bourget (where we will later be taking those goodly folk the Carters).

It had to happen! As a sister-ship - well, plane - to the Vicious Viscount Pierre Laval, Mike Stevens brings us, Phillippe Petain, the Collabo Connie:

Orly - Es Senia, Algeria. Traitors of France Aircraft: Be the first on your block to collect the set...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

We overfly Limoges:

I have done Paris - Bordeaux in reality, going down by car (flew back). The car was driven by a Frenchman and I hear you say 'He lived to tell the tale?'. Francois had recently done his military service, interestingly enough in the French Zone of Berlin (this was in '78), and as he'd been a high-ranking general's personal driver in the French Army I felt safe enough. It was his father, Professeur J, who drove like sh1t and nearly killed both me & my Dad on several occasions.

Another old friend from the AI down there:

That sinking feeling... Then a DC-3 scudded by right below us:

Eventually, somewhere to the south of Bordeaux, we see the sea ahead...

...and the Pyrennes are off on our port side:

Map showing the crossing of France next. Incidentally, my book of geographically-inaccurate pop song lyrics is to be entitled Lost in France. Keep sending them in please.

Another old friend, the Atlantic Ocean. Boston, Mass is just about opposite on the other side:

Rich people holidaying at Biarritz (LFBZ) buzz around below in their private aircraft:

Little cotton wool clouds have formed around the foothills below:

Vlaardingen presses on, carrying the lucky Carters over another border.

The long drive down there with Francois was educational because
the further south we went the more blossom appeared on the trees and the more sunshine there was in the sky. We shared a pack of his Gitanes and my Marlboro (remember cigarettes?) and I probably learnt a lot of colloquial French. (For the record, I think it was a yellow Peugeot 504 and I had my 18th birthday in Poitiers).

 

[tgibson]

Hi,

The Aigle Azur aircraft is a Boeing 307 Stratoliner, the first pressurized airliner. It points up an error in the AI traffic I discovered just recently - Aigle Azur was taken over by UAT in 1955 and the Stratoliners were sold off to Air Laos.

The airport GMFM is Bassatine AB, in Meknes, Morocco. We assume it was used by RAM in that era, since they list that city in their timetable.

And the SABENA planes closest to us are DC-6B's, with DC-4's and Convairs in the background.

Hope this helps,

Tom Gibson

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Didn't know the French purchased Stratoliners. From the front it looks a bit like the Breguet 763 Provence which we saw back at Tegel, though that's a 4-engined monster with a peculiar tail arrangement. Maybe Bassatine has closed or doesn't take civil traffic any more, as it's not in the Seldec book.

We have a few more of Tom's Cal Classic AI treats before touchdown at Barajas...

Northern Spain is still green & fertile, but it turns hotter, more desert & bleaker as you travel south.

Another Moroccan:

Morocco used to be divided colonially between France and Spain. The Spanish still have bases at Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan coast, very useful for the British whenever the Spanish try to complain about Gibraltar. The French have gone from North Africa. They took the lightbulbs, but left some nice buildings and pretty boulevards.

Further from his home, a Swiss Seven Seas:

That's Lisbon back to Geneva, Cointrin. The other is Tancos, Portugal - Bale Mulhouse, France. Our approach to Madrid, we continued on a south westerly heading, later turning north for a landing on RW36:

It's about 2000 ft above sea level and reminds me of Tehran, another capital city on a high plain surrounded by mountains. Iberian Convair 440:

More of their Connies down there:

Aviaco DC-3, Spanish charter line:

And this...

Cordoba - Barajas. We get our clearance...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

A nice shallow approach and I got it down OK:

Iberian DC-3 behind us...

...going to Barcelona.

Only MS default buildings here, but the AI has had the Cal Classic treatment:

Managed to park in more-or-less the right spot; Connies handle pretty easily on the ground if you keep it slow:

Explorer spots this Air France Caravelle going from Orly to Mohammed V, Morocco. Mrs RR and I arrived at that airport one night in the late '90s. It was exciting because a lot of Moroccans were just returning from the Hajj pilgrimage, being met by their happy, ululating relatives. Most people were dressed in their best traditional robes and, despite the modern airport setting, there was a powerful sense of being in a completely different culture.

This is the flight for Lockheed Constellations:

Exotic visitor who won't have any language problems in Spain:

If Mrs Carter wanted to find a European country that wasn't 'progressive' in the '50s and '60s, Franco's Spain would have fitted the bill nicely; though she made no comment on modern politics. Of course she was just pleased that her Seventh Day Adventists were just about tolerated.

Our ride around the city was with thankfulness in our hearts for the progress of liberty in that country, writes Sarah Elizabeth in her inimitable, convoluted style. But it wasn't liberty here and now (the kind that matters) that she meant, she was thankful that they'd got rid of the Spanish Inquisition!

The fact that Franco's contemporary fascist police state bumped off its enemies a little less publicly was neither here nor there.

Anyway, here's a tower shot from Barajas. We were slightly late, getting in at 11.20.