The Flight

This picture harks back to an age when 'planes were more like buses, stopping upon the way to their destination to drop and pick up passengers and, because they didn't have the range they have today, to refuel.

This 'plane is a South African Airways Boeing 707, the workhorse of long-distance travel in its time, and is seen at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands in September 1967. It was en route to Johannesburg but, because there were sanctions against the apartheid regime, only certain countries, including Franco's Spain, would allow the national airline landing rights. The other places it stopped were Luanda in Portuguese Angola and Salisbury in Ian Smith's rebel Rhodesia, where we disembarked.

It also harks back to an age when, at every stop, all the passengers had to be disembarked while the 'plane was refuelled. In those days, people simply walked across the tarmac to and from the airport buildings. Everything, including our boarding at Heathrow, was so much more casual and pleasant than today.

Not that flying was always fun. Although jets like the 707, Comet and VC10 suffered much less than the older turboprop 'planes, hitting thermals could be impressive, throwing the 'plane around; and the mechanics were less reliable, so I recall several occasions when an hour's stop turned into many hours and, as happened once in Rome after part of a Bristol Britannia's engine had fallen off over the Mediterranean, almost a day.