If you asked the average Ellen DeGeneres audience or a random selection of current Ivy League college students in the United States to raise their hand if they knew that Vienna is the capital of Australia, I bet half of them would.
I see an Airbus A380 threw a shoe somewhere over the Atlantic yesterday. That’s pilot lingo for a catastrophic and explosive engine failure. Actually I made the “lingo” thing up. Fortunately these planes have three spares so despite an unscheduled pit-stop in some godforsaken, frozen wasteland called Goose Bay in outback Canada, just up the road from Mud Lake, all’s well.
What is the connection between these two statements? You may well ask. It may take me a little while to get there but here goes.
One of the many dates I chose to start writing my travel book was July 1st 1992. This date was very marginally auspicious because my flight had just touched down in Tokyo. Nothing special about that you may well posit, but the particular airline which was benefiting from my custom that day was rather infamous at the time for bits falling off their planes. It was and is one of the largest airlines in the world which was just as well because they regularly needed to replace parts which they kept losing, in-flight rather alarmingly. Nothing serious like a wing you understand, just the occasional door or engine or wing flap. This did however raise serious issues of safety like do I keep my seatbelt on and go out with the seat or should I attempt to grab whatever is locked down before being sucked though the rather disconcerting hole in the fuselage. So surviving this flight was for me, rather auspicious. I resisted the urge to belabour this point by making an “I survived the ride on Flight—— “ t-shirt.
The airline is question was an American airline and not long after the date of my safe arrival in Tokyo, a number of American airlines began pulling out of the Australian route. There’s a joke there that Australians will understand and Americans won’t. One airline remained loyal to the trans-Pacific corridor and here’s where we link the first two apparently unrelated sentences in this piece.
Despite the fact that most Americans don’t know where Australia is, back then their planes could find us by following the debris trail across the Pacific. Ta daaaa.