In the outline of Switzerland’s air services in 1939 (see Post # 6) there was mention of two (unspecified) Comte aircraft in the service of Alpar and one “Comte A.C.4.” operated by Swissair. Alpar operated both before and after WWII but there appears to be no information whether it did so during the war. Can anyone help?

There is a Wiki entry for ‘Alfred Comte’ that outlines his career including his aircraft manufacturing company, Schweizerische Flugzeugfabrik Alfred Comte. Wiki also has an entry for the “Comte AC-4 Gentleman” and for the “Comte AC-12 Moskito” but neither mentions their use by either Alpar or Swissair.

The Swissair Comte AC4 was probably HB-IKO, though it spent part of its life with Ad Astra as D-ELIS. An article in 1960 referred to it having spent 17 years with Swissair but also stated that it was first registered in Switzerland in September 1930, without specifying the exact chronology.

The Comte aircraft I could find listed as owned by ‘Alpar Luftverkehers’ were HB-ALA (a Conte AC12) and HB-ALE (a Comte AC4). Below is a photo of the latter, which was first registered in June 1929 and was dismantled in 1950 at Belp, the airport at Berne that Alpar had established in 1929

Here’s a link with a lot of Turkish de Havilland aircraft photos:

http://www.ole-nikolajsen.com/TURKISH%20FORCES%202004/civil%20DH%20fotos.htm

From this collection, I’ve selected a shot that shows not one but two Turkish DH86s:

Thanks for the Hart Preston photos in Turkey (Oct 1942?). The aircraft taking off in the background of this one appears to be TC-GEN, a DH.86B Express of Devlet Hava Yollari (State Airline):

I found the ‘drawing’ in question. In fact, there were drawings of three Swiss Bf 109s, each with slightly different styles of ‘neutrality stripes’. The caption for two of the drawings reads, “Alternative Styles of Identification Striping Applied to Swiss Bf 109E Fighters During the War Years“. As I say, the third drawing shows yet another style. If there was no single standard, perhaps Swiss Air Lines had a relatively free hand in the style they adopted.

The drawings illustrated “In Defence of Neutrality” by Werner Gysin (FLYING REVIEW, September 1963) being an article about Swiss Bf 109s in WWII. There are several interesting aspects to this article but the most relevant here concerns two Luftwaffe BF 109Fs that landed at Belp on 25 July 1942 as the result of a navigational error. These two aircraft were impounded, taken on charge by the Swiss Air Force as J-715 and J-716 and “were quickly painted up in the Swiss markings which, sometime earlier, had been augmented by flamboyant red and white identification striping“. The dating is inexact but it reads as though these “neutrality stripes’ came in earlier in 1942.

There was also, in an issue a few months later, a drawing of a Morane-Saulnier aircraft in Swiss ‘neutrality stripes’. It was a Swiss-manufactured (under-licence) D-3800 (based on the MS 406) but, whereas all the other MS.406 drawings on the page are ‘dated’, the Swiss one is not – unfortunately.