MY FLIGHT OF FANCY

The dream I have of flying like a bird was fulfilled in a way when I took off to the air recently as I para-sailed in Penang. The reassuring harness strapped to my body the speedboat took off with a great speed and noise and hurtled me into the air, feet dangling and all, for a sensation I wanted to experience since my childhood. As I soared higher and higher, I watched the Penang beachfront receding into the distance and the horizon widening to unveil a jewel of an island.

Flying was a novelty to most of us back then when I was a child, for both adults and children. Few aircrafts landed at Kathmandu and those pilots who flew them were legendary. Whenever I came across these pilots, pointed out to me in whispered awe by my minders, I used to look up to them both literally and metaphorically. I remember a Sikh pilot and another Anglo-Indian pilot frequently flying the Nepal skies. I cannot remember their names. However the real Indiana Jones of the time was a Polish pilot; more of him later.

It was sometime during this period that I dropped a bombshell sending the household into a tizzy: I would become an airline pilot when I grew up! The consternation this unexpected announcement generated caught my mother in a pang of anxiety as she slapped me and started sobbing. Flying for a living was a subject one did not broach ever after. But flying I did for the very first time in a Douglas DC-3 of Royal Nepal Airlines when I accompanied my father to Patna en route to a train journey bound for Varanasi and Lucknow back in 1962. The Dakotas were noisy and shaky and I remember father and son puking at the Patna airport washroom after a particularly violent flight.

DC-3 Aircraft at Kathmandu's Gauchar Airfield

Starting from 1950 the first commercial aircrafts to land at Kathmandu's "Gauchar", cattle grazing field, were the Dakotas of Himalayan Aviation, an airline company started by Nepal's political exiles Subarna Shumsher and Mahavir Shumsher based in Calcutta with 3 DC-3s acquired from the Burma Front. Both the Ranas would finance to the hilt many burgeoning but penniless political parties hell bent on ousting the Rana regime but I digress. It took Captain Stanislaw Bujakowski, a gutsy Polish WWII veteran of the Royal Air Force and accompanying good karma to fly passengers from Calcutta into the mountains up north and land in Kathmandu Valley. The couple Bujakowski - Halina and Stanislaw - were intrepid adventurers who embarked in 1934 on a transcontinental journey from Warsaw to Shanghai on a BSA G34-14 motorbike for "their honeymoon"!  Following Hitler's invasion of Poland Stanislaw joined the RAF in England and fought for the British. After the war he joined Himalayan Aviation and flew frequently to Nepal.


Halina Bujakowska's book on her journey with her husband Stanislaw from Warsaw to Shanghai in a motorbike

The Bujakowskis and their BSA motorbike

After 1951 for the first time supplies were flown into Nepal instead of transported on the backs of porters over the interminable mountain passes. Himalayan Aviation was merged into Indian Airlines in 1953 while the Nepalese aviation industry would grow independently with the formation of Royal Nepal Airlines in 1958.

My dream to fly has been fulfilled in more ways than one since my childhood. I have brought in international charter flights to Nepal filled with tourists, represented numerous airlines such as Malaysia Airlines and Aeroflot and assisted China Southern Airlines to fly to Nepal. I was not destined be a pilot; that is all.

Transavia Airlines' maiden flight to Nepal, September 1998