Slides-A Pick 'n Mix

[DaveB]

They drop whatever they want Joe.. in flight.. on the ground.. it makes no difference to them

ATB

DaveB

[Tomliner]

DaveB wrote

Sounds like one of the many Airline series from the 60's/70's.. Airline springs to mind

Airline-I take it you mean the series featuring Roy Marsden.It was really quite good.
And to Hot_Charlie-glad you're enjoying the piccies.I've not exhausted them yet although deciding which are to be posted is a bit of a puzzle.I have put up some photos which I think may be either too poor in quality or not very interesting but they seem to strike a chord sometimes.More soon.EricT

[petermcleland]

I enjoyed flying the Merchantman because we still had three pilots and the payload never complained...I had no trouble with livestock but hardly ever carried any. There were one or two technical differences between the Vanguard and the Merchantman but no real difficulties. The catering was superb with FOUR First Class Meals loaded on for each Heathrow departure and that included a fine cheese board, a selection of fruit, four cans of fruit juice and an unopened full tin of biscuits (we left this last item sealed and took it in turns to take it home)...One needed a rather large briefcase to crew a Merchantman because of the great size of the "Doggy Bags".

Dave...That 18 tonnes of Dehrams was flown from Barcelona to Rabat...We positioned to Barcelona and the deserted fully loaded aircraft was parked out in the bundu with nobody in sight...We took off and the autopilot immediately failed.

We landed at Rabat and were promptly surrounded by a huge army of armed soldiers with loaded weapons pointing out radially. I cashed my travellers cheque (given to me at Heathrow at briefing) and we got a taxy into town for a meal...He took us on a circular tour of all the Embassies and then waited outside the restaurant while we ate our steaks. We bought a souvenir each on the way back to the airport as we were not allowed to take any coins out of the country.

Back at the airport as we walked out to the aircraft I distributed the remaining coins to the loaders who were walking in the opposite direction.

The big shock was the fact that when we reached the aircraft it had been UNloaded alright but they had neglected to REload it with the empty pallets etc and everything was just scattered loosely around in the fuselage with nothing arranged or anchored or even engaged in the rails...Large pallets were even leaning diagonally from floor to ceiling!!

One F/O had a bad back so just two of us had to sort it all out before eventually taking off and flying to Heathrow...Manually remember as Autopilot u/s...

That was one Merchantman sortie that I will never forget

[DaveB]

Tks for refreshing the old grey matter on that story Peter. Makes me laugh everytime I think about it

ATB

DaveB

[Tomliner]

To think that all this discussion started from a couple of very average old slides taken 33 years ago is quite amazing.There are a couple more shots of APES ,not yet seen here which have been sent to DaveB.I'll try to remember to post them next time.ATB EricT