Lazy8

I think that's a publicity photograph, mocked up before delivery (and so quite possibly used for a postcard, although I don't think I've seen that one before). It's not Photoshop, but "proper" retouching, which was quite common in those days. Why they'd use an incorrect registration is an open question. BEA were not at all keen to take the 20 JU.52s on offer from the Government, so perhaps at the time the photo was retouched, they didn't expect to.

I'm no expert, but from what I can see in a book called "The Speed Seekers" (Thomas G. Foxworth, Haynes, 1989) the M.33 was built with narrow floats. Various modifications were made before the 1925 Schneider race, including a revised rudder (the original having a pronounced mass balance). The narrow floats were still fitted after the rudder was changed, and the broad floats were in place for the race. Hope that helps.

Probably all lettering. Company title and aircraft name for certain. The blue being dark, it is very difficult to tell from photographs, and the only surviving documentation relates to errors, so is obviously not giving the full picture. Postwar, BOAC specified black registrations with blue lettering for company title and so forth (and even then there were plenty of variations), which might lead one to conclude that Imperial were the same, but I don't personally think the photographic evidence backs that up.

Imperial Airways specification was that the lettering for mainline passenger aircraft should be in Imperial Blue (often also referred to as Company Blue). Second line aircraft could have the lettering in black. Short Brothers clashed with Imperial on this more than once - Scylla and Syrinx were both delivered with black lettering and, despite quite heated correspondence, it is not entirely clear that it was ever changed. Some of the Empire boats may also have been delivered with black lettering instead of blue. On the other hand, the two Avro 652s probably should have been delivered with black lettering and were almost certainly delivered with blue, and I have yet to find anything suggesting anyone mentioned it. The blue colour was very dark. It was a special colour mixed for Imperial by Dulux, and neither they nor we have any documentation specifying the precise shade. It is almost certainly identical to BOAC Corporation Blue (also Dulux Special, and unfortunately the same lack of current documentation). For restoring models in the BA Museum collection, I have used Ford Midnight Blue, courtesy of Halfords, which seems a good match for the samples we can find, although I'd be the first to admit that it is somewhat subjective.

I had forgotten how much of Bowyer's book is devoted to the civil O/400s. Thanks for reminding me of it, Graham. I'd tend to agree with you about an even number of aircraft probably occupying an even number of crates - certainly ex-factory, I think that's a very reasonable assumption. But maybe not. If they'd been repacked "in the field", then you might expect to see like components crated together, I suppose. If the two aircraft were headed for the same place, perhaps the logic of having the fewest crates was inescapable. I imagine the amount of space they occupied would be the major factor in shipping charges, but perhaps number of crates was a factor too? As an aside, when Imperial Airways sold the HP W.9 to a goldmine in New Guinea, that was shipped out in four crates: fuselage in a big one; outer wings in a second slightly smaller; not sure of the distribution of parts between the other two, which were smaller again and identical.

I can provide a little more information, and some speculation. Not a complete picture, and while I think it points to there being significant gaps in the current "received wisdom", I'd have to admit other opinions may be equally valid! The timeline I have is this: 2 September 1919 Major Henry Meintjes is appointed as South Africa representative of Handley Page, according to Handley Page's Board minutes. 26 November 1919 Captain S. Wood, the South African representative of Handley Page, is in Cape Town to establish an aerial passenger and mail service. Wood is mentioned as HP's rep in both the Aeroplane and Flight, but not in company documents, nor does he feature again. He may have officially been Meintjes' deputy, as Meintjes was at this point still in England, flying commercially for Handley Page Transport (for whom he is relentlessly referred to by the British press as "Menzies"). 28 December 1919 First O/400 has arrived in Cape Town. Major Henry Meintjes, HP's Manager in South Africa, is on his way to supervise its unpacking and assembly at the airfield at Wynberg. The aircraft has 16 "luxurious" seats, of which two are in the nose (meaning there's 14 in the cabin - the seats in the nose were most likely just a bench, not at all "luxurious"). (6 February 1920 Formation of Handley Page Indo-Burmese Transport, with the intention of bidding for mail contracts in the sub-continent. By June, it has become clear that the Indian government will refuse to grant contracts to airlines run by aircraft manufacturers, and so Handley Page's interests are sold to locals. The major local shareholder in HPIBT was the Thakur Saheb of Morvi, who was so taken with flying generally that he had already appropriated one of the company's aircraft for himself.) 8 February 1920 Flight records that during the past few days some Handley Page aeroplanes (note the plural) arrived in South Africa. These don't have to have been O/400 family - at the time HP were actively selling the Norman Thompson flying boat all round the world, while at home they were in the middle of the negotiations which created the Aircraft Disposal Company - but if they aren't O/400s there appear to be no obvious other candidates mentioned later. 11 February 1920 An O/7 belonging to Handley Page South African Transport suffers an unspecified accident. 14 February 1920 Copy date of a report to The Aeroplane, commenting on HPSAT's excellent opening. 19 February 1920 HP O/7 HP.7 G-EANV Pioneer is wrecked in a force landing at Acacia Siding, near Beaufort West, Capr Province, South Africa. Maj Henry Meintjes MC AFC, Capt Christoffer Johannes Venter DFC, Askew (engineer) & 7 passengers unhurt. The force landing was necessitated because of the fatigue failure of one of the rudder posts - a design flaw in the O/400 which was only just making itself known, but would eventually result in the type being grounded. (Although the implications were not appreciated, tail flutter was a known issue, occasionally severe enough, on landing, to result in the tail hitting the ground rather harder than intended, breaking the skid - it may be that's what is being investigated in the photo.) Meintjes was roundly congratulated for his airmanship in bringing the damaged aircraft to the ground with no injury to the occupants. Shortly before this accident, Meintjes and G-EANV had been present at the opening of HPSAT's "own" airfield at Wynberg. (25 February 1920 O/400 HP.27 G-EAMC is wrecked in Sudan while attempting to fly to Cape Town.) (5 March 1920 An aircraft of Handley Page Indo-Burmese Transport flies Calcutta-Bombay. This is almost certainly an O/400, and an aircraft which had been giving demonstration flights around Calcutta for some time. It is generally assumed to have been G-IAAB, but may have been C9700, which as nominally an RAF aircraft had flown all the way out there.) May 1920 O/7 HP.11 G-EAPA arrives in Calcutta, specially fitted for the Thukur Saheb of Morvi - aluminium dope all over, blue nacelles and pink silk interior, as G-IAAC. The aircraft was destroyed in a gale October/November 1920, and a replacement ordered to a similar specification from HP. This was HP.34 G-EASX, with not only pink interior but pink overall apart from the blue nacelles - the Indian registration G-IAAC was reissued for this aircraft. HP.34 left Cricklewood towards the end of November 1920, and was test flown in India in early 1921 - again it probably went via the Cape, although if a bright pink aircraft had been erected and flown out there in December 1920 I'm sure there would have been a record! June 1920 O/7s HP.10 G-EAQZ and HP.12 G-EAPB are shipped from England to India. I have no sight of their route, but it is quite likely they went via South Africa as the previous aircraft did. 11 August 1920 A piece in the Aeroplane, without precise dates, notes that HPSAT were unlucky in their first attempt to reach Johannesburg "earlier this year", but have done much good work around the Cape and elsewhere, including flying a rugby team from Cape Town to a match, which they won, and then back again. 4 October 1920 Meintjes relinquishes his position as HP's manager in South Africa. It would seem that this marks the end of HPSAT. So, assuming one takes contemporary press reports at face value, it would appear possible that there was at least one other O/400-type aircraft in South Africa at the time. This would be an aircraft without an HP fleet number, which many have interpreted as meaning it was not built, or at least not completed, but may just mean that they were sufficiently confident not to have test-flown it in the UK prior to shipping. Handley Page had great plans for airline services, military flight training, and all sorts of aviation business the world over. For a variety of reasons most of these projects came to nothing, and those that did see the light of day didn't last. It would thus appear possible (but by no means certain) that somewhere between 1 or 2 up to as many as 40-odd O/400-type aircraft were completed for civil use in foreign countries but not actually used. Their potential shipping out to Brazil, South Africa, India and perhaps elsewhere would have coincided with the problems with the aircraft's tail unit design becoming apparent, and the aircraft once arrived would not have been worth shipping home. I suggest that might be why, if they did exist, they faded so readily from history. (This is the fate that befell G-EAAF when it reached America, supposedly to start an American Handley Page airline, but thwarted by the US Congress forbidding the import of foreign aircraft while it was in transit.) There were also more than a dozen O/7s - not only the converted, rebuilt O/400 F5414, which became O/7 G-EAAF, but several other conversions of completed O/400s to O/7-standard as O/10 and O/11 which would have appeared more-or-less identical to a pilot. The aircraft allocated to Handley Page Indo-Burmese Transport were initially given registrations G-IAAA, IAAB and IAAC, and at least IAAC was reallocated to a second O/400-type. All three registrations were, not long after, reallocated yet again to aircraft belonging to different owners. The waters are muddy, to say the least, and I think it is not-inconceivable that an aircraft registered G-IAAA was flying in India at the same time as HP.8 was flying in South Africa. Difficult to prove, though. Part of the answer may lie in shipping manifests, some of which might be in the National Archives, but I'm not aware of anything that might tell us which ship to look for, nor precise dates... Good luck!

The Annexes were reprinted in Flight for 31 July 1919, with a reference back to the British Regulations (which in part they copied) reprinted on 8 May 1919. As they are more than 100 years old, and reproductions by the magazine of official documents, I don't believe there are any copyright implications. Please remove this if it turns out I am wrong. Some notes of my own: The various nationality marks were originally based on the radio call-signs expected to be used by aircraft which were likewise based on those already in use for international shipping. I've not gone into this aspect, but it seems likely that a primary differentiator in that was how the call-sign appeared in Morse code rather than voice - this maybe explains some of the rather-less-than-obvious choices for country letters. It is also clear from these that the British use of G-E, G-A, G-I and G-U for Britain, Australia, India and South Africa, and G-CA and G-CY for Canada was a simple way of ensuring there was always a vowel in the radio call-sign. While A/AU was an obvious choice for Australia, I for India and U for the Union of South Africa, E was more "the one left" than a celebration of Englishness. It took the Americans a while to fully ratify the convention, and by the time they did it was starting to dawn on them that there weren't quite enough letters in the alphabet for their purposes. A later change to the original convention allowed the use of up to six numbers in place of the four letters. There are a number of notable omissions from the list of countries. Any country on the losing side of the Great War wasn't a party to the convention because they weren't allowed to have aircraft in the first place. A number of others found themselves unable to take part for a variety of reasons: Switzerland, for instance, refused to be party to the convention for several years because they would have been effectively prevented from developing commercial links with Germany and Austria. Slightly amended by me to make it more readable, this is the text: ANNEX A. The Marking of Aircraft I.—GENERAL. (a) The nationality mark will be represented by capital letters in Roman characters, e.g., France F. The registration mark shall be represented by a group of four capital letters ; each group shall contain at least one vowel, and for this purpose the letter Y shall be considered as a vowel. The complete group of five letters shall be used as a call sign of the particular aircraft in making or receiving signals by wireless telegraphy or other methods of communication, except when opening up communication by means of visual signals, when the usual methods will be employed. The nationality and registration marks are assigned in accordance with the table contained in section VIII. of this Annex. (b) On. aircraft other than State and commercial, the registration mark shall be underlined with a black line. (c) The entry in the register and the certificate of registration shall contain a description of the aircraft and shall indicate the number or other identification mark given to it by the maker; the nationality and registration marks mantioned above ; the usual station of the aircraft; the full name, nationality, and residence of the owner and the date of registration. (i) All aircraft shall carry afixed to the car or to the fuselage in a prominent position a metal plate, inscribed with the names and residence of the owner and the marks of nationality and registration. CERTIFICATE of REGISTRATION. [Provisional Form.) Nationality Nationality mark .. Registration marks Date of registration Type of aircraft... (Tourist, Commercial, State) Maker Maker's number Desciiption Owner's full name Owner's residence Owner's nationality Station of the craft Signature and seal of authority issuing this certificate [Sections II., III., IV., V., VI., VII., are as in Schedule IV._of the British Regulations - see below.] VIII.—TABLE OF MARKS. The nationality mark of the State named below applies to the aircraft of its Dominions, Colonies, Protectorates, Dependencies, or of countries of which it is the Mandatory State. Registration Marks. For the five "Great Powers" who contracted to the convention: All combinations made in accordance with the provisions of Section I. (a) of this Annex, using a group of 4 letters out of the 26 of the alphabet, each group containing at least one vowel, e.g., ADCJ , PURN. USA - N British Empire - G France - F Italy - I Japan - J For other signatory countries Bolivia - C - All combinations made with B as first letter. Cuba - C - All combinations made with C as first letter. Portugal - C - All combinations made with P as first letter. Roumania - R - All combinations made with R as first letter. Uruguay - U - All combinations made with U as first letter. Czecho-Slovakia - L - All combinations made with B as first letter. Guatemala - L - All combinations made with G as first letter. Liberia - L - All combinations made with L as first letter. Brazil - P - All combinations made with B as first letter. Poland - P - All combinations made with P as first letter. Belgium - O - All combinations made with B as first letter. Peru - O - All combinations made with P as first letter. China - X - All combinations made with C as first letter. Honduras - X - All combinations made with H as first letter. Serbia-Croatia-Slavonia - X - All combinations made with S as first letter. Haiti - H - All combinations made with H as first letter. Siam - H - All combinations made with S as first letter. Ecuador - E - All combinations made with E as first letter. Greece - S - All combinations made with G as first letter. Panama - S - All combinations made with P as first letter. Hedjaz - A - All combinations made with H as first letter. British Regulations SCHEDULE IV.—Registration and Nationality Marks 1. The registration and nationality marks shall be such as the Secretary of State may direct. 2. The registration and nationality marks shall be affixed in Mack on a white ground in the following manner, and underlined with a black line :— (a) Flying Machines.—The marks shall be painted once on the lower surface of the lower main planes, and once on the upper surface of the top main planes, the top of the letters to be towards the leading edge. They shall also be painted along each side of the fuselage between the main planes and the tail planes. In cases where the machine is not provided with fuselage the marks shall be painted on the nacelle. (b) Airships and Balloons.—In the case of airships the marks shall be painted near the maximum cross section on both sides and on the upper surface equidistant from the letters on the sides. In the case of balloons two marks shall be painted on the maximum horizontal circumference as far as possible from one another. In the case of airships the side marks shall be visible both from the sides and ground. 3. The nationality mark in the case of flying machines and airships shall also be painted on the port and starboard sides of the lower surface of the lowest tail planes or elevators and also on the upper surface of the top tail planes or elevators, whichever is the larger. It shall also be painted on both sides of the rudder, or on the outer sides of the outer rudders if more than one rudder is fitted. In the case of balloons the nationality mark shall be painted on the basket. 4. In the case of flying machines the height of marks on the main planes and tail planes respectively shall be equal to four-fifths of the chord, and in the case of the rudder shall be as large as possible. The height of the marks on the fuselage or nacelle shall be equal to four-fifths of the depth of the narrowest part of that portion of the fuselage or nacelle on which the marks are painted. In the case of airships the nationality mark painted on the tail plane shall be equal in height to four-fifths of the chord of the tail plane and in the case of the rudder shall be as large as possible. The height of the other marks shall be equal to at least one-twelfth of the circumference at the maximum transverse cross-section of the airship. In the case of balloons the height of the nationality mark shall be equal to four-fifths of the height of the basket, and the height of the other marks shall be equal to at least one-twelfth of the circumference of the balloon. In the case of all aircraft the letters of the nationality and registration marks need not exceed 8 ft. in height. 5. The width of the numbers or letters shall be two-thirds of their height and the thickness shall be one-sixth of their height. The numbers or letters shall be painted in plain block type and shall be uniform in shape and size. A space equal to half the width of the numbers or letters shall be left between each number or letter. 6. In the case of underlined letters the thickness of the lines shall be equal to the thickness of the letter. The space between the bottom of the letters and the line shall be equal to the thickness of the line. 7. Where the registration and nationality marks appear together a hyphen of a length equal to that of one of the numbers or letters shall be painted between the nationality mark and registration mark. 8. The registration and nationality marks shall be displayed to the best possible advantage, taking into consideration the constructional features of the aircraft. The marks must be kept clean and visible.

The purpose of the orange panels was to make the aircraft more visible to rescuers in the event of a force landing. On 21 January 1939, Imperial Airways C-Class G-ADUU Cavalier force landed in the Atlantic due to carburettor icing. The aircraft broke up and it was some time before the survivors were rescued (by a passing tanker). As a result of this, Imperial decided that trans-oceanic aircraft should have bright panels on the top surfaces, following Pan Am's lead (Wikipedia will tell you Pan Am started painting the orange at this time too, which is not the case - but I think this incident did prompt them to start suggesting to subsidiaries like Panagra that the orange panels were a good idea...) . So far as I can tell, only the two S.30 flight-refuelled C-Class boats actually carried the bright panels prewar - Cabot had red upper outer wings and tailplane; Caribou had a different shade, most likely orange - precise shades not recorded. Published photos are almost always the "prettier" pictures taken during trials, before the coloured panels were painted. Later on, some of the boats on the Horseshoe Route had red outer wings for the same reason - in this case the red was the same red as used in the tri-colour stripes below the registration letters, most likely the prewar roundel red. I'm sure someone who knows more about Pan Am can fill in the earlier half of the story.

The idea that a captured Ensign was re-engined with DBs seems to have come from a small piece in The Aeroplane in 1943, reporting that a Ensign captured in France had been sighted operating in Finland. There appears to have been no truth in any element of that - although I don't have the reference for it, I understand it was thought at the time to have been inspired by one of Lord Haw-Haw's broadcasts. The aircraft they were referring to would have been G-ADSX Ettrick, captured at Le Bourget after being damaged in a Geman air raid. The only other more-or-less airworthy Ensign that was captured was G-AFZV Enterprise, force landed in West Africa in February 1942, and reported used as a hospital plane around the Mediterranean in late 1942.

If you do put a strip of plastic inside the join to reinforce it, be aware that the plastic of the two kit fuselage halves is not necessarily precisely the same thickness. If you don't allow for that, you can actually make things worse using that technique. That said, it's my preferred way of doing it. You just need to be careful.

The colour of the lettering on Imperial Airways aircraft is a vexed subject. There are documents in the BA archive which suggest that the lettering on all mainline passenger carrying aircraft was intended to be "Imperial Blue" or "Company Blue", whereas the lettering on other company aircraft (e.g. mail-carriers, those only used for charter) was intended to be black. I very much doubt that this was strictly adhered to. The two Avro 652s G-ACRM and G-ACRM, which were very definitely in that second-line category, were almost certainly finished with blue lettering, and left that way when Imperial repainted them. There are letters in the archive detailing occasionally quite acrimonious correspondence between Imperial and Shorts because Shorts kept delivering aircraft with black lettering when it should have been blue (definitely the two L.17s, perhaps a number of C-Class boats). There is more, but it doesn't answer the question. If there's any record of a resolution to this, I haven't found it. We're not helped in that the blue is so dark that it is often indistinguishable from black in black-and-white photos - particularly given that many of those will have been taken with a filter on the lens to darken blues to make the sky more interesting. And there is no record of precisely what colour Company Blue was. In internal records it is only referred to by that name or by reference to an ICI catalogue number - contact with ICI revealed that catalogue to contain only special mixes for particular customers; numbers issued in chronological order, and beyond that they hadn't kept the records. As a best guess, Imperial "Company Blue" and BOAC "Corporation Blue" are one and the same colour, but while the 1960s BOAC blue is fairly well documented, there is evidence that it wasn't quite the same colour as that for immediately post-war. (During the war, lettering on all BOAC aircraft was supposed to be black, with silver outline as necessary, but it seems some painters used blue when it was available...)

Caledonian Airways, as in BA's charter subsidiary, post-merger? Yes, that's Landor colours, but with the detail painting in yellow (which from memory is not B.Cal gold. but a cheaper, easier to apply finish). Not the same blue as B.Cal used.

I've got one of the Lincoln kits. This is a lot smaller, and it's one piece.

I'd say it is too small to have found much use in a travel agent setting. More likely sold as a memento, or handed out to office managers and so forth in places that were likely to book lots of travel, to keep BOAC at the front of their minds.

Short answer seems to be that there is no short answer. Photos in the BA Archive show BEA aircraft with nothing at all behind the pilot (providing flood relief in Holland or building a dam in Wales), with a webbing contraption floor-to-ceiling just behind the pilot to stop cargo flying about too much, and with one or two simple seats (upholstered apparently in either company maroon leather with cream piping, or a mid-grey). The two would be side-by-side across the rear of the cabin, obviously. Nothing shows the interior clearly, and I could easily be convinced that no two photos show the same configuration. When carrying passengers, the two rear 'D' shaped windows had curtains, and there's a net for hand bags across the ceiling between the windows just behind the door. So far as I'm aware, there are no drawings available.