These were the headlines which followed the opening of our new services to
Bulawayo on the 5th January, 1959, when for the first time C.A.A. operated
Viscounts between Salisbury and Bulawayo, and Bulawayo and Johannesburg.
A tremendous amount of goodwill towards C.A.A. (Central African Airways) was
evidenced by the fact that so many prominent people gave their time to take the
flight with us to Bulawayo and back. Our guests included such busy people as the
Federal Minister of Transport, Mr. W.A. Eastwood, the Mayors and Mayoresses of
Salisbury and Bulawayo, the Presidents of Chambers of Commerce and
Industry, the Postmaster General, travel agents and members of the Press.
The City of Bulawayo itself "went to town" in welcoming the new C.A.A. venture
by giving a Civic Luncheon to mark its appreciation, at which 137 guests
attended. In his speech at the luncheon, the Mayor of Bulawayo paid a warm
tribute to C.A.A. Our Chairman, in his reply, was in his best form and was able
to give the pleasing news that we are operating within our subsidy figure.
Above: Passenger Attendants SHEILA BUCHANAN and ANN
WILLCOCK presented corsages to the lady passengers on arrival at Bulawayo of the
first Viscount service. In this picture Sheila hands Mrs. Pocket her
corsage and Ann pins another on Mrs. McNeille's frock
While we cannot say at this stage that the Viscount services into Bulawayo will run at 100% load factors, we are quite sure that there will be many converts back to air travel over the coming months.
Readers will recall that the last time a Viscount visited Bulawayo, we had the honour of carrying Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
End
Extracted and recompiled by Eddy Norris, from the C.A.A. magazine "The SCAANER" dated January 1959, which was made available by Dave Vermaak Thank you Dave.
In the original copy the title of this article had VICOUNTS, ORAFs made thee change to VISCOUNT.
Comments are welcome, please enter them below or mail them to orafs11@gmail.com and they will be uploaded to this article.
To view the Blog Home Page - Please Click Here.
(Please visit our previous posts and archives)
I was there that day, a shift leader I was, I remember Sheila and Ann well - worked with them for about three years - fantastic to find all this - been browsing for hours - thanks for the memeories!
ReplyDelete