Always a great shame when an ‘old stalwart’ bites the dust. I feel for the crews and staff at the airline. I can remember some years ago, my partner and I flew from LHR-BUD on a Malev Tu134. As we were waiting to board, I shall never forget the look on her face when she caught sight of the aircrafts glazed ‘bombardiers’ nose. As she was a nervous flyer, I couldn’t help but tell her that there would be a removable square of carpet on the floor about half way down the aisle. What’s that for, she innocently asked. “It covers the bomb doors, my sweet” I shan’t detail her reply, suffice it to say, that if I did, I’d have a mod baying for my blood. RIP Malev……..hopefully we’ll see you again someday:(

Thanks for those AEI 44s, Sarah. It’s been great seeing these old STN shots, and all the others. We definately could do with a historic airliners section.:)

Very nice shots Tim. I don’t know how big your ‘photo vault’ is, but I hope there might be some more:)

Some amazing pics Tim, and thanks for taking the time to post them. Glad they were rescued from that bin:)

Lovely shot of that Saturn ‘8 longshot. As a young kid of 10 years at that time, and an aircraft nut, it was really exciting to see these 8s at around 2,000 ft or so, directly overhead our house. Ref to my friend that I mentioned in a previous post, who used to do cabin cleaning at STN throughout the 70s, I took your pics of the Saturn and AFA 8s to show her this morning. Betty is now well into her 80’s and it bought a tear to her eye to see them. During my days at STN, Betty was by then doing office cleaning for many companies at STN. Her nickname used to be ‘Betty the Satallite’ because she used to always have these two big hair pins sticking out from a ‘bun’ on top of her head, and she was a great source of gossip and information on what was happening on the airport. Servisairs MT shop, even painted up a standard baggage trolley in their sky blue, complete with a BET 1 number plate. Thanks longshot.

That C46 is a gem! Back then, STN played host to many unusual visitors, in particular tha DC8s belonging to the US carriers such as, Saturn, ONA, AFA, TIA, and Airlift. An elderly friend of mine, used to clean the cabins on the turnarounds of those 8s. She told me that there were sometimes ‘soldiers’ on board, and sometimes ‘ordinary’ folk. During the mid 80s, we used to handle the DC8s of the US carrier Capitol.

Yes, I remember the AEI ’44s. There used to be an engineer who’s surname was Baines, and an English guy called Tony who seemed to be their station ‘rep’ Ridiculous that I can remember the surname of one and only the christian name of the other. I’m not sure if Mr Baines was an ATEL guy, or just employed by AEI. I think that around about the same time, we were also looking after Tradewinds with their STN based 707, along with Scimitar, also with a 707. A couple of us Servisair traffic guys had a transatlantic round trip, courtesy of the Scimitar crews. I can’t imagine it would be allowed now.