Column: These flights are not for faint of heart

Another plane was lost last week on the Nepalese route from Pokhara to Jomsom last week, this one with 22 people aboard. I say "another" because this is a standard occurrence on this brief little hop, and it always makes me sad because the Nepalese are a beautiful people and I have such fond memories of the nation. The 20-minute flight departs Pokhara with passengers neatly groomed and arrives with every hair standing directly on end. As a college professor once said of the Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Airlines, "you don't buy a ticket, you buy a chance." Coincidentally, the plane that crashed last week in Nepal was a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, which Allegheny once flew on its shorter routes to smaller cities like Hagerstown. It was a little honey badger of a plane, famous for fast climbs and operability on short runways — both critical for the Jomsom flight. But Allegheny was gone by 1979, and the Twin Otter ceased production a few years later, meaning that Nepal was running an airline with planes quite likely manufactured during the Carter administration. It's different now, but when I flew that route the airline was called Buddha Air, which was appropriate because sometime before the flight ended you were sure to see God. I remember well the Pokhara airport because, well, who could forget? If you ever saw a Greyhound bus station in the 1970s, you get the photo. Along one wall was a giant scale like the kind used at old race tracks to weigh jockeys. It had a dial maybe three feet in diameter, and we all had to file past, standing on it with our backpacks while an employee squinted at the quivering arrow and jotted down numbers in a little book. When all passengers were accounted for, he tallied the figures and said something in Nepalese which I took to mean "close enough," and we walked across the pavement to the waiting aircraft. I was no stranger to third-world transportation. In Honduras, the jet had hit the runway so hard that the doors to all the overhead compartments popped open; at a landing strip in Peru, we had to circle the airport for 15 minutes while the authorities were called in to clear the runway of kids playing soccer. As for the Bolivian Road of Death, the less said the better. But this … this was different. When we boarded, two pilots who spoke English were sitting in front poring over the manual saying stuff like, "... turn lever to the full 'on' position — can that be right?" After we landed, a staid British woman calmly remarked, "Such an enchanting flight — all that talk in the beginning about how the plane worked." We had been unofficially warned that, although we would be trekking into a sparsely inhabited void and climbing to close to 20,000 feet, this flight was the weak link. Survive it, and you're probably good. I don't know what kind of aircraft it was, but the seats were vinyl, straight from a 1950s diner, split and duct-tape patched, and there was one row of them along each side of the fuselage. As we strapped ourselves in, the last words of the attendant were not "have a nice flight," but "hold on." The flight gains considerable interest halfway through when the plane turns right to follow a narrow river gorge between two 23,000-foot massifs. The tiny craft was bumping and bucking, and through holes in the clouds, we could catch glimpses of the chasm walls seemingly close enough to reach out and touch — on both sides. Still, this was the appetizer. The main course was the Jomsom runway, which was about the length of a car wash and ended, abruptly, with a thousand-foot plunge to the river below. We were grateful to make it, but just as comforted by knowing that after a two-week hike we'd be leaving the region by bus. — Tim Rowland is a columnist for Herald-Mail, a columnist for Sun Community News, and a New York Times bestselling author. His books include "High Peaks; A History of Hiking the Adirondacks from Noah to Neoprene" and "Strange and Unusual Stories of New York City".

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Column: These flights are not for faint of heart

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