AWT IV

AWT IV

This week I am presenting a part of one of the four chapters I have written about our Around the World Trip that we made in 1987 on a chartered 747 with Air Canada. The first chapters tell about how we decided to take this extraordinary trip, and then described the details about the itinerary and the care and feeding of the passengers on a 21-day trip around the world.  In the previous chapters, we had already visited Fiji, Perth, Bali, Kuala Lumpur and are about to take off for Kathmandu, high in the Himalayas where a Jumbo 747 had never landed before our flight.  This is just a little excerpt from the chapter leading up to our being given an audience with the Living Goddess, a tiny seven-year-old girl living in the palace.

The last night in Kuala Lumpur we attended cocktails before the outdoor banquet and entertainment. We were chatting with the Captain about how wonderful everything had been so far, and just out of curiosity I mentioned that as the next stop would be Kathmandu, with the notoriously short runway and the Himalayas blocking the end of it, that it was the first time a Jumbo had landed there, I supposed the crew had made a trial run with the 747? Don looked serious and said, “Well, no, not exactly. What we did was to have our arts department take several sheets of plexiglas, layer them to the precise miniature height of the mountains at the end of the runway, and carve out the shapes.” When I raised my eyebrows, he went on, “Then we calculated the weight of the plane, the approximate weight of the passengers, the amount of fuel needed, and the amount of thrust needed to propel us down the runway, and the degree of banking we would need to lift off and immediately turn left, to avoid the mountains. But our flight is actually the first time a 747 has landed and taken off in Kathmandu.” As he listed the possible danger points, he saw my eyes getting bigger and bigger. Then he said reassuringly, “But, not to worry, Janice; we practiced it dozens of times in the control room back in Toronto.”

I smiled half-heartedly and wryly asked, “With toy airplanes?”