VH-EBR (2)
Boeing
707-338C
(c/b 18954)
Here's the 'City of Wollongong' loading at
Mascot on 27 March 1974 with the forward freight
door open. Greg Banfield, who took the photo, also provides
a close up of the nose of the air-
craft, taken at the same time (below). Greg's other shot at
the bottom of the page shows -EBR
barreling out of Mascot some four years earlier (March 1970) in the
original V-Jet tail livery.
VH-EBR flew its first
revenue schedule on 12 February 1966 on the
Kangaroo Route to London.
In June 1974 it was sold
to
Malaysian Airline System as
9M-ATR (re-registered 9M-MCR in 1975).
From there
it went
to Somali Airlines as 6O-SBN and
had the indignity of being hijacked to Addis
Ababa on
24 November 1984
whilst en route from
Mogadishu to Jeddah (I was living in Jeddah at
the time). The
incident ended well and the aircraft was released three
days later unharmed. It then
went to the US as N449J and
was RTP'd at Tucson in the late 1980s.