I’ve been out visiting since just after I posted the Pathe News newsreel but I got a couple of stills of the aircraft in question from the film. They’re down below.

At 5.35 – 5.37, it looks like the same aircraft appears crossing right to left, as seen from inside the the tower.

Great bit of footage, longshot. While a few brief seconds here and there looked familiar (perhaps more than one newsreel film crew was there then), that was new to me.

AL636 was delivered to Prestwick on 20 May 1942, which could well suggest the time-frame for the filming, though it looks as though it stayed at Prestwick for over 3 months for modifications, so that sequence could have been staged any time over that summer. I can fairly comment that, having lived less than a mile from Prestwick airport for a number of years, some of the weather in the film is not unknown in summer there but it does look more autumnal than that in places..

Thanks for posting it.

Thus is a July 1941 report on the Atlantic Ferry service. It comes from an American newspaper that went by the rather splendid name of the PALLADIUM-ITEM.

These are three of the photographs accompanying the article in Post # 282 (“Bomber Ferry” from April 1942) :-

Getting back onto track, this photograph was published in a Canadian newspaper towards the end of September 1941 and was described as one of the first photos of the Atlantic ferry service. The caption says that the B-24 / Liberator is being refuelled at “Newfoundland Airport”. The serial number appears to be AM918, which was one of Libs allocated to the ferry service. If the photo has been republished subsequently, maybe this can be confirmed.

Below are some details from the ‘Bryan Priestman Fonds’ at the University of New Brunswick (‘fonds’ is French for ‘collection’). They list some flight plans from his service as a navigator with Ferry Command, now held in the university’s archive.

Bryan Priestman went to Cambridge University and, moving to Canada shortly after the First World War, became a lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan, got a PhD at McGill University, became Head of Physics at UNB in 1929 and enlisted in the RCAF in 1940. After time with the First Army Cooperation Squadron and at Headquarters in London, he later transferred to the Atlantic Ferry Command as a navigator, rising to the rank of Squadron Leader. Discharged in September 1945, he returned to UNB but died in November 1945, attempting to rescue a drowning boy from the St. John River.

He gets a brief mention in Carl Christie’s “OCEAN BRIDGE” book as one of three RCAF navigators assigned to train TCA navigators in preparation for the Canadian government’s wartime transatlantic service, though it notes that he returned to Ferry Command sooner than the other two.

The ‘Flight Plans’ listed in the document posted below include flights using AL590 and AL593, two BOAC Liberators, as well as ferried aircraft.

Oops! Part of one the above images went AWOL. Here’s the whole text:

There appears to be more than one dictionary definition of the word ‘airline’. The more common one refers to the operating company but the other refers to the route taken by air between two places. The latter, it would seem, can be rendered as one word [‘airline’], two words [‘air line’] or as a hyphenated word [air-line’]. As the second newspaper report was based on a radio broadcast, it is not possible to determine exactly what was meant.

In pre-war Britain, operating companies generally used the word ‘airways’ in their titles. The exception that comes to my mind [there may be others] is Spartan but that was called ‘Spartan Air Lines’ – that is, three words, not two.

In Scotland, Scottish Airways was formed in 1937 and absorbed into BEA in 1947. In 1946, Scottish Aviation started Scottish Airlines [two words, not three}, presumably so-named to distinguish it from Scottish Airways. And mention of Scottish Airlines brings us back to the civilian use of Liberators.