For Keith…who is obviously as attached to Skyways Connies as he is to Dan Air Yorks!

G-ALAL on wet day at Changi in mid-1961. She’d have looked even better on a nice sunny day.

David T.

A great line-up of planes that were assembled one day in Feb 1962. There is a York in there, trying to hide away from the ‘flashy new boys’.

Ahh there she is!

DT

Laurence: Nothing on a C-47 43-48886 alas.
If I ‘Goggle it’ I can see ‘traces of your fingerprints’ in various postings…so I guess you’ve been chasing this ‘Gooney Bird’ for sometime. I don’t doubt therefore that you’ve seen: http://www.ec47.com/numbers.htm
which lists your aircraft as an EC-47P.

Here’s another pic of my mysterious South Vietnamese C-47 with no serial no. on it at all. It just wears one of those tails codes that they had. In this case ‘eA’.
The other SVAF a/c is 315874’A’ and the final one is Indian Air Force HJ217. The unmarked plane and the IAF one have the tail wheel spats I notice.
This is Changi 1962.

DT

In the 60’s Daks were ‘two-a-penny’ and every airport had some around.
I have teems of pics of them in my files from those years. Wonderful aircraft and I wonder if that other great transport design, the Hercules, will finally last as long?

Air Atlantiques G-AMPZ in an earlier guise. Working here for an Indonesian based oil company, but still on the UK register.
It’s taken at Paya Lebar, Singapore in 1963.

The RAF didn’t hang on to theirs as long as some others and that includes the US.

This is KJ955 at Changi in late 1961.

This is KP277 parked at 390 MU, Seletar in early 1963.
These two, KJ955 ‘Hope’ and KP277′ Faith’ were two of the three that made up 110 Sqdn’s ‘voice’ aircraft. They operated out of Kuala Lumpur in Malaya and relayed messages to the Communists on 300Watt airborne PA systems.
KJ955 remained with the RAF at little longer and was finally destroyed by a terrorist bomb at Khormaksar, Aden.
KP277 was sold shortly after the above pic was taken.

4 South Vietnamese C-47’s at Changi…before ‘the war’. They were interesting in having US Air Force style ‘national insignia’- but in the ‘wrong colours’! Someone with no imagination chose the South Vietnamese markings I guess. A ‘Puppet regime’ perhaps also springs to mind.

Here’s a South Vietnamese C-47 that will cause a problem for ‘spotters everywhere’…it has absolutely no serial number on it.

David Taylor.

Atcham, Martti thinks your Russian pics are ‘colored black and white photos’.
If so they are very well done. I could believe the Yaks flying shot was but the soldiers in uniforms I not so sure.
You’d need a large format neg to be working on to touch up b-and-w to a high standard I guess. I’ve tried it in Photoshop and even that is very hard work.
Do we know if the Russians had colour film in WW2?

Dave T

It’s strange now to think on how slow many photographers were in moving to colour…and I mean long after the war when it was readily available.
There was a continuing acceptance I think that black and white was still the normal way that we viewed illustrations of all sorts. Even as late as the early 60’s when I first got interested in photography, newspapers and TV were still in black and white, although of course movies were all colour.
It was not seen as strange to shoot say your family snaps still in b-and-w. Colour was usually only Kodachrome or Agfa, both transparencies only and pretty slow. I remember in the late 60’s that Kodachrome had become available in ASA25 and ASA64 versions, but the later was noticeably grainy.
Transparency stock is infact capable of a wider ‘dynamic range’ than negative material and transparencies were required for ‘commercial printing’ anyway, so it continued for most professional work.
Even in the late 60’s however many of us were still biased away from using colour because of the cost and the difficulty that transparencies faded easily and needed a projector to display. Eventually Ektachrome and other neg films from other manufacturers changed our perception and finally automated processing moved into the high street.
DT