panel design based upon that of the airline’s
leet of Hawker Siddeley Tridents.
These non-standard instrument its would
later cause some problems when it came
to selling the aircraft on the second-hand
market, but in the short term, the efforts
helped bring some commonality between
the Trident and One-Eleven leets. Both
aircraft had a fully automatic landing system,
and while in BEA service would eventually
operate to a decision height of 60ft (18m) in
a minimum visibility of 273 yards (250m).
The airline took an early opportunity to
display the One-Eleven at the Farnborough
Air Show in September 1968, with G-AVML
taking part in the lying programme. Base
training, to initially introduce crews to the new
type, was carried out at the manufacturer’s
airield at Wisley, near what is now the
junction of the M25 and A3 in Surrey.
Circuit exercises and night lying took
place at Bournemouth and Teesside.
Route instruction was conducted from
Manchester Ringway, later designated as
the main base for the leet when it entered
operational service.PHASED BEGINNING
Negotiations with the British Airports
Authority led to a reduction in landing fees
at both Prestwick, Scotland, and Stansted,Essex, with the latter selected as BEA’s main
training base for the Super One-Elevens.
An intensive programme was scheduled
between November 1, 1968, and July 31,
1969, with three aircraft and six training
captains allocated to instructional duties at
any one time. During the eight months, 250
pilots were converted.
The new aircraft were initially used as
ad hoc substitutions on the network fromSeptember 1, 1968, and were gradually
introduced into regular service from
November 17, on the IGS lights based at
Berlin-Tempelhof and on the London to
Manchester route.
Seven new aircraft were delivered from
the manufacturer by the year end. During
the following summer, One-Elevens werescheduled to operate six daily round-trips
on the Manchester to London route, daily
rotations on Birmingham-London and
Birmingham-Dublin, with a double rotation
on the Birmingham-Glasgow route.
The following year saw the aircraft lying
new routes out of Glasgow, heading to
Düsseldorf and Palma, both with a stop
in Manchester. By November 1, 1971, the
One-Eleven leet had taken over all of the
IGS lights from the Viscounts, along with
much of the scheduled network out of
Manchester, including lights to Belfast, a
daily Manchester-Düsseldorf-Berlin service,
and several of the London Heathrow toWest
Germany operations.
In April 1969, BEA reached an
agreement with Air France to pool
resources on the IGS routes to more
effectively compete with Pan Am. Air
France had previously operated from
Berlin’s Tegel airport using its Sud Aviation
SE210 Caravelles. However, the airline
was unable to use these airliners in and
out of Tempelhof, because the type lacked
thrust reversers. Regular use of braking
parachutes was not seen as a viable option.
The new arrangements saw BEA’s One-
Elevens take centre stage, with the pooled
services employing a BEA light deck crew
and cabin crew drawn from both operators.24 Aviation News incorporating Jets December 2018
HIJACK
G-AVMP was en route to London from
Manchester on January 7, 1975, when it
was hijacked by an Iranian national. The
hijacker, armed with what was later found
to be a toy gun and imitation dynamite,
demanded the aircraft head for Paris,
France. Instead, it touched down at
Stansted. The incident ended peacefully
with the person involved taken into custody
by the anti-terrorism squad.A BEA Super One-Eleven at Manchester Ringway airport on a sunny day in September 1972. The Samba CollectionOne-Eleven 416EK, G-AVOF, awaiting passengers at Liverpool Speke Airport in October 1975. Bob O’Brien Collection