Classic British Flight Sim

Hello Mate

That sounds like a plan. A reasonable rule of thumb is to note the highest points along your route (if possible) and add 2000ft to those as a cruise. It means constant attention having to climb and descend but don't those trips feel good when you're on terra firma again

I'm gonna have to try extra hard and find my Lancastrian PN's.. I don't want to have to buy them again I can't find a reference to Lancastrian pax having oxygen supplies (individual or otherwise) in Flying with the Stars though I've no reason to disbelieve that link

BSAA were in many ways, 'Trail Blazers' in the true sense of the term weren't they. I'm glad we were able to add some of their routes to our schedules
ATB
DaveB

Why not just demolish the mountains



South America in general was always difficult especially in those days...a long way away, poor aids and difficult terrain for routes that were hardly prime in numbers or levels of luxury. This in the days when it was hard enough to get to New York

BOAC avoided them like the plague and BSAA fitted that bill but then was absorbed. Later BOAC was only to happy to let BUA take them on which did so with VC10's, a type that BOAC claimed could not be made to pay on any route let alone those.

BOAC came and went, picking and choosing but were never happy bunnies down there. But now they just point the nose and off they go, well above anything in the way and always knowing where they are, so it quite easy now in comparison and as such seem happy to do them as BA

With BSAA every flight was an adventure with nowhere else to go apart from back until PoNR then onwards which could mean flying into terrible weather as the forecasting wasn't what it is today and could change dramatically during the flight and no chance to get above it so perhaps stuck in headwinds that were unforeseen as in the case of Star Dust. As for the other Stars that got lost, given all the facts of flying those routes in those days, it was almost a certain bet that now and then things would go wrong and seeing how they couldn't find Star Dust after it was buried by snow, little chance of finding a sunken airliner in a big ocean with less chance of even remotely knowing where it went down.

So if BSAA survived the crossing they had the weather and or mountains to face and even into the 70/80's, aircraft flying into mountains in South America was a frequent and regular occurrence, with weather playing a major part along with poor aids which simply meant they didn't know where they were and ended up thinking they were somewhere else.

Brave for even trying it and many of their pilots had been Pathfinders. All their crashes seemed to be that end of the routes. Coming back was no problem as once they got to land it was plain sailing.

Hard to image today, but in the BSAA days every successful flight across the Atlantic had, by today's standards of good reserves, just made it.