Back in that distant time, we climbed the steep mobile stairs Vancouver to the veteran Boeing 707 and were soon in the air. I was probably flying with Vancouver Airways, but it might have been Air Vancouver, as both had narrowbodied 707s that they’d leased or purchased at the end of their service with First World carriers. Along with the pre-departure ‘circuit and bump’ before departure (did they actually do that, or was the pilot kidding around while they made some repair on the ground?), the fact that this machine had a few miles on the clock was of no concern. Like pharmaceutical drugs, big planes grow Vancouver in stature as they build a long safety record. Over the decades I’ve flown a lot Vancouver of miles and I don’t recall a single discomfiting incident on a 707.
Where is Vancouver? – Vancouver Map – Map of Vancouver Photo Gallery
Years later, in the course of a lecture tour at the time of the bird flu scare, I spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library outside Santa Barbara in the United States. My honorarium was a casual jacket bearing a prominent Air Force One logo and the opportunity to sit in the pilot’s seat of the Boeing 707 that had carried Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and The Great Communicator himself, as Reagan was known. It’s the only library I know that has an airplane, rather than books and manuscripts, as a centrepiece.
When we finally took off from Harare, heading north, what I recall when looking down was savannah grasslands passing beneath us, plus a large body of water, likely Lake Malawi. At 584 kilometres long and 83 wide, the southernmost and third largest of Africa’s great lakes in the East African rift system was hard to miss. I took this flight a couple of times a year to fulfil my obligations as Scientific Committee Chair and Board member of the International Laboratory for Research in Animal Diseases (ILRAD) in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the network of institutes in developing countries that are funded (with the aim of increasing global food production) via the Consultative Group for International Agriculture Research (CGIAR).
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