An extremely pleasant aircraft to fly. I flew them as an SFO during the late 1950s and the only serious problem I experienced was a failed oil cooler shutter on No 3 which meant the engine had to be shut down due to coring. We were northbound over France and heading for Blackbushe so it was no real problem at those temperatures in winter. The aircraft was, however, underpowered in really hot conditions and we flew therefore at night on long sectors e.g Malta-Kano in order to be able to take on the amount of fuel needed without exceeding the MTOW for met and runway conditions prevailing. The aircraft had on board a gyro-stabilised periscopic sextant and every hour, on the hour, one took a fix. This was never a problem as we were all thoroughly trained in astro navigation and in the absence of any other external navaid over a period of seven hours it was important that we did this. The aircraft was a very stable platform for using a sextant. (An aircraft of another company crashed in the desert after becoming lost as a result of not setting up a gyro compass correctly and not taking accurate fixes. Had they taken their fixes properly they would soon have found that they were off track and would have been able to take corrective action.)

Flew on a Skyways of London Hermes in 1957 troop flight from Blackbushe a/p to Singapore. Flight was not without incident. Firstly a 'long drop' of what felt like at least 1000ft whilst circling over Rome, left everyone shaken. Secondly, undershot approach to Basra/Iraq, only prompt action by pilot revving engines up to max to gain height and banging the a/c down onto the runway, saved us ending up in the Euphrates. What memories - thank god we flew back in an Air Charter Britannia. At least I'm still here to tell my granchildren.