Issue No 21 THE AVIATION HISTORIAN 77
Having kept the Freighters earning throughout
the winter with various charter flights, including
the shipment of racehorses and livestock to
destinations in Europe and the Mediterranean,
Silver City inaugurated the 1949 season on
April 13, despite lukewarm, not to say gloomy,
forecasts from the AA and RAC — which
displayed a surprising degree of pessimism,
given the remarkably encouraging results of the
previous season.
Silver City need not have worried; bookings
took a sharp upturn from June and another two
Freighters had to be leased to cope with demand.
By August the company was undertaking up
to 20 round trips a day, the highest number
of flights being completed at weekends. On
August 5 the 1,000th passenger on the ferry
service was carried. Indeed, by the end of the
season the numbers for the air ferry service
were substantially better than those for the
previous year; by the time the service was closed
for the winter in October 1949 the airline had
carried some 2,600 cars, 100 motorcycles and
nearly 8,000 passengers, using only a handful
of aircraft. Profits were up and the Silver City
Channel air ferry was here to stay.
And so it was that John Stroud was invited
to partake of the service with a cross-Channel
flight in April 1950, by which time the company
was fielding a fleet of six Freighters for the air
ferry service — the original three, which had
been extensively overhauled by Bristol over the
winter at Filton, and three others, some of which
were operated by Silver City’s French subsidiary,
Société Commerciale Aérienne du Littoral (SCAL),
established in February 1949 to square the
paperwork for the French part of the operation.
Accordingly, John presented himself at Lympne
on April 14, 1950, to sample the facilities and file
a report for British weekly magazine Flight.
An added touch of colour for John’s report
was the ferrying of a number of unusual
vehicles spanning five decades of automotive
development. One was Alvis’s “next year’s
model”, a 1951 TA21 test vehicle; the other was a
15 h.p. four-cylinder Darracq with a detachable
tonneau body, representing the state of the
art circa 1904. The Alvis was on its way to the
Amsterdam Motor Show, but quite why the
vintage Darracq was bocage-bound is unknown;
presumably as it returned the same day it
was just a day trip pottering about the French
countryside. A 1950 Austin A70 also made the
crossing, although John states that the three
cars were transported in two Freighters that
flew the route together. The photographs that
illustrate this article, taken from a roll of 35mm
film, clearly show that the Alvis and the Darracq
travelled together in the hold of Freighter Mk 21
G-AIFV on the outbound flight, which departed
the Kent airfield at 1414hr with Capt Hopkins
at the controls, and arrived 23min later at Le
Touquet, the Austin presumably travelling
alongside in another Freighter.
John was impressed with the service, noting
that, “in spite of the fact that the motoring
organisations have done much to simplify the
carriage of cars by sea, the air method presents
a particularly trouble-free means of taking
a vehicle across the Channel”. Passengers
accompanied their vehicles in an 11-seat cabin
to the rear of the aircraft, John also remarking
that the cars were quickly loaded and unloaded
by well-trained staff, and that the long waits
often suffered at the sea ports were by and large
avoided with the air ferry service.
On arrival at the still rather basic French
airfield, the vehicles were reversed down the
wheeled ramp and deposited on the tarmac,
ready for collection by their owners. John thenOn arrival at Le Touquet the cars were offloaded by
Silver City staff and parked beside the terminal for
collection by their owners. Le Touquet had been an
active Luftwaffe fighter base during the war until 1944,
when Rommel had a number of airfields disabled as
a result of his (well-founded) concern that an Allied
invasion of the French coast was imminent.