Have you seen this vintage photo of a Sydney Airport arrivals board from 1956?

There are a lot of interesting things online, but an airport arrivals board from the 1950s probably wouldn’t be top of your mind to search for. Of course, algorithms algorithm and occasionally throw up something you are actually interested in.

Sydney Airport, referred to by locals of a certain age as Mascot Airport, officially opened on 9 January 1920. Today it is one of the oldest airports in the world and a pretty busy one at that.

The Arrivals Board In 1956

For a single image, there is a lot to unpack here, so let’s begin with the airports. Only Auckland, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Momote are listed as cities, everything else is listed as a country. Momote? That is an airport on Los Negros Island in the Admiralty Islands, Papua New Guinea. No, me neither!

With just 15 international arrivals things were much quieter back then. Australia is a long way from everywhere, so it’s not an easy place to serve. It’s fun to also see the first landing at 02:55am, as there has been a curfew in place since the 1990s restricting operations during the overnight period.

What About The Airlines?

Some of these are familiar and some are long consigned to the annals of history. Qantas is still flying today as is KLM and both are pretty well known. PAA should be clear to aviation geeks, as that is Pan American World Airways, abbreviated to PAA and eventually known as Pan Am for short.

TEAL stands for Tasman Empire Airways Limited and is still flying today, but not under that name. The arrivals board gives the clue, all its flights are from New Zealand and the airline today is called Air New Zealand. TAI is very obscure these days, standing for Transports Aériens Intercontinentaux. It was a French airline that merged with UAT to form UTA in 1963, and UTA itself merged into Air France in 1992.

Working The Arrivals Board

According to someone on Facebook called O’Nikulas McKulapan, this is how it went down. “It was one of the easiest gigs around. Half the time, we didn’t even know where the planes were coming from. If the details were unclear, we’d just throw up the name of a country from the general region — close enough was good enough.

And letters? Oh, we had a never-ending supply of “S” and “A” tiles, so countries like “Samoa” or “Malaysia” made frequent appearances, even if the flight was from somewhere like, say, Brunei. It didn’t matter; passengers rarely questioned it. Once, we even joked about putting up “Sassania” (not a real place, but hey, it used lots of S’s and A’s) just to see if anyone noticed. Honestly, it was all about keeping the board looking tidy and somewhat believable. No one cared if it was spot-on. As long as something was up there, it was good enough for us — and apparently for everyone else too!”

Overall Thoughts

Fancy an arrivals board having some stories to tell. What an unusual thing for the Sydney Morning Herald photographer to have taken a picture of back then. This was during the period when the 1956 Olympics were being held in Melbourne, so perhaps the board had a lot of extra airlines on it compared to the usual.

What do you think of the picture? Have you flown on any of the airlines or been to Momote? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

Like planes? See my “Does anyone remember” series.
Flight reviews your thing? Mine are all indexed here.
Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Featured image by woofyc_89 on Reddit.
Arrivals Board a Sydney Morning Herald news picture by Graham Coleman via Facebook.
PAA Stratocruiser at SYD by Booshman on Bonzle.com.
Qantas Super Connie via Aussieairliners.org.
Qantas Connies and TAA Viscount via Aussieairliners.org.