You know I'm a bit of a plane geek and with the lockdown, I've not been able to
travel for ages, it must be over a month since I've set foot on an aircraft, but
I've recently discovered some super 8mm cine-film footage taken by my
grandfather back in the 1970s, and it's got some fabulous shots of some vintage
aircraft, so for this episode of RogVLOG, I thought I would share it with
you, fancy joining me? Welcome to RogVLOG.
Our little trip down memory lane takes us to the holiday island of Menorca, now
of course, today it's a thriving very busy airport, back in those days it was a
lot smaller, let's go take a look,
our first vintage jet airliner is the De Havilland Comet, here operated by Dan Air,
and they were affectionately known as Dan Dare-ways, Dan Air operated a fleet of
Comets to the Mediterranean holiday islands,
DanAir fell into financial difficulties in the early 90s and were bought for the
princely sum of £1 by British Airways in 1992,
and the comet last flew in 1980, and this Dan Air example ended up at East Fortune
air museum near Edinburgh, I wonder whether this is the same aircraft, just
taking off is a Britannia Airways Boeing 737-200 series,
this is a Monarch Airlines Boeing 720B, that's quite a rare aircraft to see even
in those days, Monarch finally went into receivership in 2017, so they hung around
for a while,
this Boeing 707 belonged to Laker Airways who used to fly to the Mediterranean
under the brand name Skytrain, I remember this plane being incredibly
noisy as we watched it taxi out to the runway, Laker went into administration in
1982, I think there's a bit of a pattern starting to emerge here,
and this is my favourite part of that old footage, now you must remember back then,
I was only six years old and this was the first time I'd ever seen a wide
bodied airliner, a Tristar from the airline Courtline, imagine how huge this
aircraft looked to me,
Courtline was a popular charter airline and famous for their very colourful
planes, this Tristar was orange and yellow and other planes in their fleet
were coloured purple, turquoise, and green,
yes it's a little garish I admit, but I think the colour on this Tristar looks
fantastic,
sadly one year after this film was taken Courtlinewent into administration as
well in 1974, and those colourful planes were never to be seen in the skies again,
look at that train of luggage trucks, and because there were no stairs at Menorca
Airport big enough to fit to the front of the aircraft all the passengers had
to disembark from the rear stairs which were built into the aircraft, and just
arriving is this Dan Air BAC 1-11 jet, and this was the aircraft that was
going to take my grandfather back to Manchester,
there are so many travel vlogs around these days that show take-offs from
airports around the world, I can't believe that my grandfather took this
all the way back in 1973, right after takeoff our stunning views of the port
of Mahon the capital of menorca and some final glimpses of the coastline and the
beautiful beaches of Menorca as the plane heads back to the United Kingdom,
such amazing memories, I just love all those vintage aircraft, if you enjoyed
this episode of RogVLOG please do subscribe to my YouTube channel and I'll
see you on the next one.