How the 1970s oil crisis affected civil and military aviation

Thanks for all your replies, very interesting memories there….with the usual service humour!

On a large transport aircraft base in Wiltshire :rolleyes: the MT vehicle mileage was severely capped during the fuel crisis. On my squadron, engineering staff were instructed to walk to their designated aircraft on dispersal, carrying the necessary tools and equipment with them, rather than use a vehicle – not necessarily a bad thing, you might be thinking. However, some of the remote stands were a round trip of about one hour from the flight office; the tools and equipment also required a greater number of personnel than previously for their carriage as there were insufficient hand carts available – together, this often slowed the job down somewhat! Anyway, this in itself was not a major problem as local flying was severely restricted during the fuel crisis, thus reducing the number of serviceable frames required for tasking. By default, some of the ground engineers clocked up more flying time than aircrew during this period (not many ‘flying spanners’ v lots of aircrew).

During the power strikes/outages, the dispersal stadium lighting was turned off at midnight, unless an urgent operational requirement dictated otherwise. Apart from a severe lack of illumination for engineering tasks that took place during the hours of darkness, this resulted in several incidents; the most serious being a ‘road traffic’ accident in which a ground engineer was knocked down and injured outside the line squadron hangar by a patrolling RAFP in his Minivan. Apparently the plod failed to see the engineer due to the lack of lighting, stadium lights ‘off’ and Mini headlamps on! – the outcome resulted in ground crews being instructed to wear reflective cross-belts over their working kit during the hours of darkness!

Didn’t help Concorde, IIRC.

It certainly curtailed the flying at 231 OCU Cottesmore,although I did invest the extra spare time in volleyball and motor bike maintenance (the boss must have wondered why I volunteered to look after the ground equipment LOL) !
On a more personal note it also put the brakes on any power flying : (

I was cabin crew for BOAC at the time (VC.10s and 707s). I was away on a three week round the world trip on one occasion when a middle east crisis started up. Our three week trip was essentially doubled to 6 weeks as they cut the normal daily service to every other day due to fuel shortages we were told-meaning our rostered trip now took 6 weeks instead of 3.
It was hell having to have twice as much time off in NewYork/L.A/Honolulu/Fiji/Auckland/Sydney/Singapore/Bombay and Dubai!! (Not to mention twice the daily allowances-which were quite considerable in those days). I had seven days off afterwards and got called out from standby to go and do another one-shame!!. (You were normally lucky to get a 591-(BA591) round the world trip once a year.)

Found my fathers old coupon book the other day for his Ford Cortina III, he was on Nimrods round about then & I remember a lot of car sharing & MT usage going on so everyone could get to work on the the base.

I wonder if it was proposed to ration aviation fuel for the users of private aircraft, in a fashion similar to that planned, but not implemented, for road vehicles? Not long ago I came across my book of petrol ration coupons dating from 1973 – for a 50cc moped (whose tank only held about a gallon, which was good for over 100 miles)!