WELCOME TEARS
If you didn’t get to fly into or out of Hong Kong before July 1998 you missed two of the most amazing experiences an airline passenger could have. Before then you would fly into Kai Tak. (Check out the YouTube videos). Your approach was between apartment blocks. If you were on the left side you would see washing strung across balconies ABOVE you. Then a 90 degree right turn and a steep descent to make sure you hit the runway early and not risk ending up in the bay.
Take off into the mountain involved the reverse: a steep climb and a tight left between the apartments. And this in wide-bodied jets. I recall an uneventful if wide-eyed daytime arrival from Bangkok in around 1990. After a brief stay at The Mandarin (where breakfast was so expensive we had Egg McMuffins down the street!) we travelled on to Bali with Garuda – Indonesia’s National Airline named after a bird in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. We were very keen to return to a hotel which we had loved the year before. Garuda had not been having the best of fortunes and their safety record was not good. Seeking to reverse these they contracted American Airlines to overhaul their procedures and acquired a number of that company’s surplus to requirement aircraft. It was on one of these in which we were to fly. (You could tell because, although the external livery had been changed the interior remained a drab brown and the signs were in English and Spanish.) The captain and co-pilot were, I think, from AA (airline, not alcoholic support) with one or more Garuda pilots under instruction. The cabin crew were in part Garuda rookie trainees.
Our flight was delayed many hours as the incoming flight had suffered severe turbulence resulting in quite serious injury to a cabin crew member. It was after midnight when we (my wife, seven year old daughter and l) embarked. I remember one young guy in the cabin crew not surprisingly being very jittery, this being his first round trip. There was also something of an altercation when the captain discovered that the doors had been set to automatic with one of the maintenance guys still onboard. The weather was foul and I recall being rather more nervous than usual on takeoff, which was quite hairy from Kai Tak at the best of times.
Anyway, we arrived at our hotel around 04.00am, tired, ragged but pleased to be there. At reception the young man said how sorry he was that we had had such an eventful journey. I said that we were delighted to return having stayed the previous year. He bowed and, with a namaste , said, “Welcome home, sir.” I confess that I wept.