Following from the thread about the QANTAS offices in London being
decorated to mark the launch of Flight 714 in the sixties, I thought I'd contact the company to see if they had any records of that or promotions being tied in to the book.
Unfortunatey the curator of their archive, David Crotty, who got back to me, wasn't able to find anything about the office in their files, but he
did come across a very nice publicity picture, showing the arrival of the first copies of the books in Australia, which he has allowed us to
reproduce for you here.
He also went above and beyond the call of duty, by forwarding to us a vintage scheule of flights from the period, which shows that (perhaps unexpectedly) there
really was a Flight 714, from London to Sydney!
The only problem is, it wasn't a QANTAS service - it was BOAC (which, after merging with BEA, is now better known as British Airways)!
See the page
here; you'll find the flight in question in the top row, about half-way across.
Not sure if that has been reported anywhere else, and I don't think I knew it before, so thank you to David for that little nugget of data!
Just for reference, B.E.A. stood for British European Airways, and B.O.A.C. stood for the British Overseas Airways Corporation; Q.A.N.T.A.S. stands for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services"...
