Historic photos of Heathrow as we celebrate 75 years of commercial flights

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• Dave Tilley says:

  3 Jan3 January 09:08

  My first flight from London Heathrow was in the summer of 1966 .
  it was a VC10 to Lusaka Zambia , i remember the captain waking us up just as the sun was rising and telling us to look out at mount Kilimanjaro and a short while later we came into land at our second stop Nairobi , there was also a third stop at Ndola before we eventually arrived at Lusaka ,while on board they gave us postcards of the VC10 which we could post home , those were the days .

• Wilfred says:

  3 Jan3 January 10:39

  What impelled the Air Vice Marshal and those intrepid, hatted pax to pick Buenos Aires as the first destination – in a Lancaster? (I wouldn’t fancy it!) Historically, the Argentine railway network and many utilities were British-owned (some out of Moorgate, where my father worked from the mid-1930s at the River Plate Trust). And they had a large British staff, who would have welcomed these flights. But the writing was on the wall: significant assets were nationalised by the Perón government by the end of that decade. Where would a first-off flight be headed, today?

• mark2 says:

  3 Jan3 January 11:43

  Those sheds remind me of the first time that we flew into Pisa in 1988. We flew on Air2000 from Gatwick after a five hour delay in the terminal. Pisa airport was actually still an Italian Air Force base and there were lots of black Hercules aircraft parked around the perimeter.
  We walked across to a large shed and our luggage appeared on an open lorry shortly afterwards. There were no immigration or customs checks and we picked up our luggage and boarded the coach.

• pedro says:

  3 Jan3 January 12:05

  Great article. Was intrigued by the two photos of OO-TIP. A Google search reveals it was a Fairey Tipsy S-2 (‘S’ for Sport) originally built in Belgium in 1935 and kept in the UK during WWII. It was repatriated back to Belgium in 1949.

• 1ATL says:

  3 Jan3 January 12:32

  This article inspired me to look up some old pathé newsreels earlier of Heathrow back in the day. One of the newsreels from the mid 1950’s linked in with an article you ran last year about the BEA West London Air Terminal. It showed off the brand new terminal and queens building and finished off showing a BEA helicopter ‘airbus’ link to the then Waterloo Air Terminal. I did a bit more fact finding and it turns out this was the Cromwell Road facility’s predecessor. It was situated on South Bank adjacent to the Royal Festival Hall just across York Road from Waterloo Station and offered check in facilities to BEA and BEA handled airline passengers. It would roughly be where Jubilee Gardens and the London Eye are situated today and was housednin temporary buildings left over from the festival of Britain. You could take a bus to Heathrow or for an additional supplement take the helicopter instead which hugged the route of the Thames in order not to overfly populated London. I had no idea about the existence of the South Bank Air Terminal until today. The site was always set to be redeveloped after the Festival of Britain and in 1958 BEA moved to their brand new purpose built West London Air Terminal in Cromwell Road which cut the bus transfer time from ‘Central London’ to Heathrow considerably. As a result and due to low uptake, the short lived helicopter service terminated permanently. Having worked in/around Waterloo for the last 20yrs or so, I found that aspect of social history quite interesting from an av-geek perspective and thought it would be good to share.

• David says:

  3 Jan3 January 13:31

  I seem to remember Heathrow had a helicopter link with Gatwick and remember seeing them fly in the 70’s as a child.

  • Rob says:

    3 Jan3 January 15:28

    It did. We ran an article on it last year.

• Steve says:

  3 Jan3 January 15:08

  The LHR construction offices are named after the converted Lancaster….which is quite interesting.

• Guernsey Globetrotter says:

  3 Jan3 January 17:32

  Yes – but look how much leg room there was! No climbing over people even if you were 9 seats away from the aisle…

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