Looking for more examples of BOAC Dakotas in WWII markings, I came upon the photograph below in a 1975 issue of AEROPLANE. It is captioned, “a quartet of BOAC Dakota IIIs under overhaul at Croydon in January 1945” but this caption is a bit misleading.

(1) The Dakota at the rear of the photo still bears its RAF roundels not BOAC’s colours.
(2) The two that can be identified (G-AGKJ and G-AGKL) are both Dakota IVs, not Dakota IIIs. They were part of a batch of four ex-RAF Dakotas placed on the civil register by BOAC on the same day, namely 7 November 1944. The batch ran from G-AGKI to G-AGKL.

The registration markings on the wings look very fresh and I think I can see a chalk guideline above the letters “G”,”K” and “L” on the one in the foreground. Is it possible that these are the aforementioned batch of four Dakota IVs in the process of being civilianised?

The photo in the previous post shows three TAP DC-3s: on the left is CS-TDA and on the right is CS-TDC. The one in the middle looks like it could be CS-TDB but that’s not absolutely certain. Maybe, there is someone out there who can identify these three aircraft.

Anyway, the two on the right are essentially in bare metal finish but CS-TDA, on the left, is not. It was TAP’s first aircraft and still carries its previous ‘warpaint’ but with civil registration letters added – and they are in exactly the same style as the British civil markings worn by the BOAC-KLM DC-3s that visited Lisbon in WWII.

The self-same link, “Crash Landings in Portugal during 1942”, that farnboroughrob posted, listed five Airacobras on the same date: 27 December 1942. A month later, FLIGHT published the photo below, indicating that there were, in point of fact, eleven Airacobras and that, rather than crashing, they had run out of fuel. I presume that these are the same incident:

In the third of the three links posted by farnboroughrob …….

http://www.warrelics.eu/forum/aviation-history/crash-landings-portugal-during-1942-a-117505/?

…… there’s a Puss Moth!!! (see 24 June 1942 in the list).

This is not in the same ‘league’ as the other aircraft listed. Does anyone know the story behind this Puss Moth crash in Portugal in WWII?

Portela Airport, Lisbon, was ‘symbolically’ opened on 15 October 1942 but the buildings were not yet finished. This photograph, published in December 1942, shows the terminal building with scaffolding around the control tower (but see the next post):

A slight change of topic. Earlier in the thread, there was a nice photo of a P-38 impounded by the Portuguese and one of the photos taken at Portela Airport showed a couple of Portuguese Liberators in the background and maybe a couple of Hudsons, too. I think one of the earlier news articles mentioned seeing Blenheims at Portela – were they impounded, I wonder? I’ve also read about 11 Airacobras ending up there on one day (and a twelfth at another airfield, I seem to recall). Someone must have compiled a list of aircraft that fell into Portuguese hands this way. Here’s another – a Sunderland [sorry about the quality but you tend to get this with old news reports]:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_European_Airways_Flight_548#/media/File:G-ARPI-path.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_European_Airways_Flight_548#/media/File:British_European_Airways_Flight_548_Geograph-3598939-by-Alan-Hunt.jpg