Some memorable flights

My first (ever) flight was in an Ansett (Australia) DC3 from Hobart to Melbourne via Launceston in January 1953. My father had been crew on a yacht in the Sydney Hobart Race and we’d gone over to Hobart to spend Christmas and to meet him when he got there. They were late finishers and because he was late back at work in Melbourne we took a plane rather than the train from Hobart to Launceston (about 120 miles and it took a whole day) and then the overnight ferry ‘Taroona’ from Beauty Point, 30 miles from Launceston, across Bass Strait to Melbourne.

The ferry ‘Taroona’ leaving Melbourne

The forward end of an Ansett DC3 cabin. Compare that to today!

The ‘Taroona’ would roll on a wet towel and we’d had a very rough crossing on the way over from Melbourne. This may also have influenced my parents decision to fly back instead.

To say that I was gob-smacked by my first flight would be an understatement. I was 10 years old and I can remember to this day every detail of that flight right down to a rivet popping out of the overhead air trunking and landing in my mother’s lap. The trip was made all the more memorable when my kid sister sprayed the forward end of the cabin with projectile vomit just as we landed at Essendon – Melbourne Aerodrome (they weren’t called airports then). The stewardess was not impressed!

My next flight was 10 years later and whilst I was at sea. During the ships’ call at Sydney I had the opportunity to drive to Wagga Wagga stopping in Canberra for lunch and seeing some really impressive scenery along the way. The return was with Airlines of New South Wales in a Fokker F27 Friendship. The most memorable part of that flight was arriving over Sydney Harbour. Many years later I was able to revisit the memory in a Piper Cherokee from Bankstown Airfield. The intervening years had not diminished the experience in any way.

Sydney harbour – breathtaking! (photo courtesy Airliners.net)

I next flew in 1973 on Playboy Club business with BEA to Belfast, out in a Trident and back in a Britannia. The most memorable part of that trip, apart from escorting the Bunny of the Year, was spending a night at the Maze Prison as a guest of the British Army.

In 1976 I moved to live and work in Saudi Arabia arriving on a BA VC10 and I seem to have spent a considerable portion of my life sitting in aeroplanes ever since.

The first of many memorable flights was my first return on Christmas leave from Dhahran along with 180 or so other wine, women and song starved oilmen fresh from several months in the desert. In those days aircraft were lined up nose to tail in two rows across the front of the terminal. Our aircraft was in the outside line waiting to depart when another aircraft from the inside line tried to cut between us and the aircraft parked in front. There wasn’t room and a collision was narrowly averted.

A call was put out for the only pushback vehicle at Dhahran but it’s regular driver had taken it home! It was three hours before the offending aircraft could be pushed back and we could be on our way.

We couldn’t be disembarked – there was no room inside the terminal so, in order to quell a rising tide of dissent, the crew took the brave decision to close the doors, shut the blinds and open the bar. The result, three hours later as we took off, was a Tristar full of happily inebriated oilmen. The party continued flat out until we reached Athens where we had to stop to pick up more fuel (and more beer – we were in danger of drinking the plane dry) then on to Heathrow where it continued in the bar at Terminal 1 whilst we all waited for our connecting flights.

If the Saudi’s had found out we could all have spent Christmas in jail.

Other memorable flights in no particular order:-

• Arriving and departing the Maldives (the short runway) – flight deck jump seat Air Lanka B737
• My first seaplane flight, again in the Maldives (see picture below)
• The snow covered Alps on a crystal clear moonlit winters night – flight deck visit Air France (Airbus A310 I think)
• Flying low level along a desert runway to scare sleeping camels off it so we could land – Saudi Aramco Fokker F27 1976
• Hong Kong Kai Tak – sadly not the ‘chequer board’ approach to runway 13 that I’d hoped for but the almost as impressive approach to 31 – Cathay Pacific B747 jump seat.
• Legging it across the tarmac between connecting flights as artillery shells started dropping on the airport boundary – Middle East Airlines Beirut 1979
• A Hajj flight to Jeddah in an ancient Saudi B707 in 1977 – open sided luggage racks – it was that old
• Arriving in Baghdad from Amman in 1980 as one of only 12 passengers on a B747 – seemed odd at the time
• Trying to get out of Baghdad to go back to Amman and realizing why there were only 12 passengers on the 747 coming in – 5,000+ in the departure lounge with only 1,500 aircraft seats available that night (Iran Iraq war)

The Afghan highlands. Not quite as good as the moonlit Alps but still impressive

Sun Express Twin Otter on floats – Maldives

But my most memorable flight of all has to be my first solo when I was learning to fly – December 12, 1977 .

Over the years since, the magic, the excitement and the pleasure of flying with the airlines has faded. The ‘pack ‘em in – screw as much as you can outa them’ business model has done that for me. Indeed, I view my next trip to London with so much trepidation that I’ve decided to fork out for Premium Economy.

The best bits, as always, will be take-off and landing when the pilot in me listens to every sound, feels every movement and knows exactly what is happening.

But now, thanks to American inspired ‘terrism’ paranoia, airline Captains are no longer allowed to invite passengers onto their flight decks thereby giving up a major aspect of their authority to lesser people (i.e. politicians and sundry erks) to the detriment of enthusiasts like me.

And that’s really sad.