in Karachi. Flight and accident The full itinerary was: Singapore, Bangkok, Rangoon, Calcutta, Karachi, Bahrain, Beirut, Rome, and finally London. The respective airports: Kallang Airport, Don Mueang Airport, Rangoon Airport, Dum Dum Airport, Karachi Airport, Bahrain Airport, Ciampino Airport, and Heathrow Airport. Gerry Bull, a former BOAC engineer, said that when he performed a preflight inspection of the aircraft in Rome he looked for "incidental damage", and as he did not find any, he believed the Comet was fit for flight. Bull and the same team of engineers later examined South African Airways Flight 201 before its final flight. Flight 781 departed from Rome at 10:31 CET (09:31 UTC) on 10 January 1954, on the final stage of its flight to London. At about 10:50 CEST, a BOAC Argonaut, registration G-ALHJ, piloted by Captain Johnson, which was flying the same route at a lower altitude, was in contact with Captain Gibson. During a radio communication about weather conditions, the conversation was abruptly cut off. The last words heard from Gibson were "George How Jig, from George Yoke Peter, did you get my—". Soon afterwards, witnesses saw wreckage falling into the sea. Heathrow Airport initially listed Flight 781 as being delayed, but it was removed from the arrivals board at around 1:30 pm. Search and recovery On 11 January 1954, The New York Times reported that "35 persons were almost certainly killed when a British Comet jet airliner crashed into the sea ... between the islands of Elba and Montecristo, off the Italian western coast." Bodies had been recovered late into the night, and although the search had continued in the freezing water, there was little hope of finding any survivors. The task of finding out what had happened to Flight 781 was difficult at first because the accident had occurred over water. In 1954, there were no cockpit voice recorders or flight data recorders (the so-called "black boxes") to assist crash investigators, and there existed no established protocol for aircraft accident investigation at the time. An extensive search for the aircraft was organised, which included the Royal Navy ships HMS Barhill and HMS Gambia as well as the Maltese civilian salvage vessel Sea Salvor. The search effort involved the pioneering use of underwater TV cameras, developed by a team at the UK Admiralty Research Laboratory led by George MacNeice, to help to locate and salvage the wreckage in deep water.