Imperial Airdays are here again

[Ralf Roggeveen]

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:

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Where to start?

Ah, yes: there:


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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:

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The passengers board our Handley Page:


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"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:

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We cross the English coast near Brighton:


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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.


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


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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' - !

[AndyG43]

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

Nice view of Croydon ......

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

Brilliant Ralf, loved that whole thing!

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Let's have a look at the interior of one of these things:


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(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.


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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:


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


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[Ralf Roggeveen]

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

Brilliant Ralf, loved that whole thing!

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!

[AndyG43]

Yes, nice that the old Aerodrome Hotel is still there and not been flattened and redeveloped; and the Heron outside is a nce touch.

[Ralf Roggeveen]

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:

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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:


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


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A pretty dawn takeoff:


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


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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:


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


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Built-in headwind, or what?

Better go to (reality) work now, more this evening...

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Spotted a private aircraft below:

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Eventually we sight the Ionian island of Kefallonia:


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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).


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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...


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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:


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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:


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


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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!


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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.

[nigel richards]

:salute: A sight for saw eyes if ever I saw one. Great stuff Ralf. Bravo!

[Ralf Roggeveen]

It's funny being parked in an aircraft and seeing ships all around you rather than other aeroplanes!

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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:


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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).


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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.


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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:


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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).


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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!


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Yes, you've guessed it, the wonderful island of Crete...

[Ralf Roggeveen]

:salute: A sight for saw eyes if ever I saw one. Great stuff Ralf. Bravo!

Thanks, Nigel. I envy you being in the real Greece, we have a rainy, cold July day here in England, though it's ideal for playing with flightsims...

[nigel richards]

: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

[Ralf Roggeveen]

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:

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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:


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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:


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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.



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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:


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(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).

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Question is: Can I bring the big beautiful S-23 down in that pretty little harbour?


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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...


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

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


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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).


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

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


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(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).)


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[Willy]

Ralf, I'm glad to see both you and Imperial Airways back at again! :ernae:

[Volker Böhme]

...

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.
...

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/~mbcas...ng Empires.pdf

Best regards,
Volker

[emfrat]

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

MikeW

[Ralf Roggeveen]

: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...

[Ralf Roggeveen]

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:

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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...

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Success

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A good view of the whole of Mirabella:

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

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

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

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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...

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Sure enough, twilight falls...

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Time to put the lights on

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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:

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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.

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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...

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While their aircraft anchored for the night!

[Volker Böhme]

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

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Took a look at Alexandria airport and found much Imperial activity there at the crack of dawn:

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Volker is right that they usually left very early, taking advantage of daylight and cool air. All along these routes there were designated emergency landing places, mainly needed to avoid dust storms. In fact the next bit - probably the shortest leg - Alexandria to Cairo down the Nile Delta - was often done by train.

This seems a bit more stylish, however:


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The three-engined Short S-8 Calcutta, named after the capital of the British Raj for most of their 200 or so years in India. This particular one, despite having its type name in huge letters, was most appropriately called City of Alexandria. We left at 05.30:

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This was even more like driving a flying car, a convertible in fact, since the Captain and First Officer didn't have a roof. I maintained radio - sorry, wireless - contact all the way, sticking to an altitude of 3000 feet.

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Being on the outside, with them just behind you, you don't need a little window to keep an eye on the engines:


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The noise would have been something else, but they'd have been kept nice & cool (aircrew and motors):

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Most of the way you can see the Nile (which is, of course, our destination airport) below:

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The British relationship with Egypt was rather complicated. Technically it was supposed to be an 'Anglo-French Condominium', though the French never did much more than a bit of catering there, having bottled out of the original invasion in 1884. In theory Egypt was still part of the Ottoman Empire till WW1, but of course power lay with the British Governor-General, the Egyptian Khedive being a figurehead, like a British monarch. Just as today's superpower wants everybody in the world to be a democratic republic (it works for us, so it must be right), so the British set up constitutional monarchies everywhere. Who do you think decided that countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia should be ruled by a 'king'?

[Ralf Roggeveen]

The point was that the British government owned the Suez Canal - a private enterprise, actually built by the French, but they had a majority shareholding. Oh yes, the British Empire invented capitalism and free trade like we're all still supposed to enjoy today. The Khedive Ahmad Fuad was a good ruler who dealt very ably with the British - who kindly let him be called King of Egypt in 1922. Unfortunately he died very suddenly in 1936 and was succeeded by his 17-year old son Farouk (older readers may remember him from that nightmare airship trip I made down the Nile with Kapitainleutnant Bockholt and the Italians some years ago).

Farouk hated the British, but he didn't have the political cunning his father had had, and was too personally decadent ever to liberate the Egyptian people. When British power waned after WW2, it was inevitable that Farouk would be overthrown and a political leader of ability - Nasser - would emerge to create the modern nation state of Egypt.

Don't suppose Imperial Airways had any trouble getting overflying rights in those days...

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There you see our target 'airfield', Flying Boats Cairo. It is conveniently close to the Gezira (island) Sporting Club, where all the best people in the Empire were members.

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I was a bit worried that we started to go out beyond the city and deep into the desert, but eventually they did call us back and I was able to overfly and check out the destination:

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There's Gezira, the landing strip was down the far side, approaching from the south; careful not to collide with any bridges. Losing altitude and swinging round for the approach, we catch a glimpse of the pyramids:


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It's just over an hour from Alexandria to Cairo by this rather stylish mode of transport. There's the west bank of the Nile:


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And the Sporting Club on the island opposite:


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The door ingeniously opens up and doubles as steps so the passengers can descend into their launch:

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I was in a convenient place to glance down and make sure they had all left and hadn't forgotten anything:


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Very civilized.

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Having reached Cairo you may reasonably be wondering whether we'll be going south towards Wadi Halfa and Khartoum into Africa, or eastwards to India? Well, it's the latter: we'll go at least as far as Delhi, crossing Arabia, Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

The 1930s airport for Cairo was Almaza (now an Egyptian Air Force base). The modern Cairo International (Gamal Abdel Nasser) wasn't developed till after WW2 when it had been a USAAF base. Of course it was originally called King Farouk I Airport - nice '50s scenery available from California Classics. In the Imperial days you got back into one of these:


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It's the 'Eastern' version of the HP-42, only real difference between this and the 'Western' being that it seated less passengers, a maximum of 24 rather than 38 which the European routes could in theory carry. No doubt they amply made up for that in mail; it would have been rare for any HP-42 to have more than a few passengers on any flight.


The usual dawn takeoff:


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Dawn takeoffs are a bit of a hassel when you're going east since the sun has a habit of coming up and shining right in your eyes...


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We soon sight the Suez Canal:


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This is near Ismailia, north of the Great Bitter Lake, about halfway down between Port Said on the Med and Suez (As Suways in Arabic) on the Gulf of Suez/Red Sea.

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The Handley Page rumbles along at a stately 120mph/193 km/h. It's nearly 2 hours to our first stop on the way to Baghdad, most of it over the Sinai Desert.

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We have been round here on other flights, like when the Carters came down to Egypt in that Jordanian de Havilland Dragon (with a group of German archaeologists, I seem to remember).

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A Lockheed Electra (the old kind, not a postwar L-188) zoomed by below. You swing out over the Mediterranean for approach into Imperial's first stop...


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[Ralf Roggeveen]

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Gaza makes its first recorded appearance in the Bible when the blinded Sampson managed to push the pillars of a Philistine temple down, killing himself and all his enemies. The British conquered it from the Ottoman Turkish Empire in WW1, making Gaza part of their Mandate of Palestine. Many Arab refugees moved there in 1948 when defeated in their first war with the new State of Israel. In 1949 Israel and Egypt agreed to let the so-called Gaza Strip be an autonymous region, though the Israelis occupied it in the 1967 Six Day War. At the end of the 20th Century it was run by the Palestinian Authority and in 1998 a shiny new International Airport was opened with peacemaker Bill Clinton as guest of honour. Since then Hamas, much more militant and unable to make peace, have been elected to run Gaza, so the Israelis found it necessary to destroy the airport (though it survives in fs9). I am not sure if Gaza (Yasser Arafat) International was on the same site as Imperial Airways Gaza, but surely near enough; it can be used here.


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It would have been pleasant to visit the Holy Land when British occupiers were firmly in charge there during the 1920s and '30s, with peace assured between the few Jewish settlers and majority Arab population. Unfortunately the British simply gave up after WW2, unable to provide enough security to ensure a smooth political transition and prevent much bloodshed (there was a similar - even worse - crisis in the India/Pakistan conflict which began at the same time, as Britain withdrew her armed forces, ending 200 years of Empire there).


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There wouldn't really have been any nice concrete runway (probably just a big windsock), but it is useful in the flightsim...

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...and I made a very good landing there, though I say so myself. Now the Handley Page can refuel ready for our next leg across Jordan to the legendary Iraqi airfield at Rutbah Wells...

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[Sunny9850]

I personally think blame for the current mess in that region is at least equally shared if not a bit more with the hardliners in the Knesset ..... I do love this excursion into aviation history. Keep it coming .. Stefan