flown around the world
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I landed in Amsterdam at 13:45 today, having left Tokyo at 18:00 on Saturday. 37 hours of travel from my house to the hotel.
It wasn't until I was stretching out to go to bed at 21:00 local (with sunlight still strong in the sky) that I realized: I've now flown around the world!
It 1994, I came here to the Netherlands with Kamil. I then flew home on my own*. I would eventually fly between Toronto and Tokyo several times, and today I completed the final leg. Today's flight crossed China, then part of Burma, right across Bangladesh, across India, across the northern-most Arabian sea, across Oman and landed in Dubai. From Dubai we flew the length of the Persian Gulf, up the length of Iraq, across Turkey and the Black Sea, and then through the airspace of Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Chechia, Germany, and finally back to Netherlands.
Come to think of it, Toronto is clearly my global hub. It connects me to Australia and New Zealand, Haida Gwaii, Calgary, Vancouver, Halifax, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Florida, California, Nevada, Minnesota, Ireland, the UK, Germany... I think I flew to Hawaii from Vancouver but that originated in Toronto as well. LAX served to get me to San Francisco the second of three times, but that's not a lot of new territory. Tokyo is definitely my secondary hub, connecting me to China, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines.
How I met Goose Bay
*The return flight from Amsterdam to Toronto was a funny one. The computer system at Schiphol was not functioning, so they couldn't issue printed boarding passes. What ensued was chaos, as people from various European countries attempted to sort themselves out without assigned seating. Not an experience I'd want to relive on a regular basis! But underneath that fun lurked another problem. I don't know if it was a metric/Imperial thing, a payment matter, or some communication problem, but I suspect we took off with nowhere near enough fuel in the plane. Why? Because the flight landed well short of Toronto.
We were crossing the Atlantic when they announced that instead of Toronto, we would be landing at the now-defunct Mirabel airport in Montreal. That is only 580km short of Toronto, and I thought it a bit curious. Could it be a weather matter? But when they then announced a second course correction for Quebec City, I wondered what was going on. That's 800km short of Toronto, and Quebec City is not exactly the kind of place international travelers use as a hub. Thinking about the chaos at Schiphol, I wondered if somehow no one had noticed we'd left without the needed fuel. Eleven years before, an internal flight across Canada had had to land mid-way when the plane was already essentially out of fuel.
When we were approaching Newfoundland, the flight crew made some additional announcements. We would no longer be trying for Quebec City, but would instead head for Happy Valley / Goose Bay. It's a mid-sized airport but only a tiny town. I was a bit alarmed at this news, because I felt it confirmed my thinking about fuel. But then they informed us that to conserve energy they would disable the air conditioning and interior lighting. At this point I felt that I was correct, but what worried me was that we seemed to be flying at about 400 meters above the waves into a densely forested area landscape with no margin for error. We'd achieved landfall on North America, but this landing had better go right! There was a low cloud deck and the plane bounced around a fair bit as the passengers fell silent in the dark.
Even when we were on the runway and men in parkas refueled in 8ยบ weather, no one aboard seemed to feel like talking.