When flying was almost smooth as silk
Life has not exactly been as “smooth as silk” for Thai International in recent years. It is a sad state of affairs for an airline that at one time was regarded as one of the finest in the region, especially before 1977 when it was a joint venture with Scandinavian Airlines. I have always had a certain affinity with THAI, as it was the first airline I ever flew in Asia.
I remember the flight well, from Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport to Don Mueang on April 9, 1969, aboard an ageing Caravelle jet.
To me the flight was absolute luxury. Admittedly, after travelling overland from England through Asia for the previous three months, a flight on almost any airline would have felt like luxury.
The service was excellent and the charming hostess must have been the first Thai person I had ever spoken with.
It was an easy conversation too: “Would you like some more wine sir?” No prizes for guessing the response.
In the early hours of the following morning, a THAI crew from a different flight who befriended us at the Don Mueang airport restaurant gave my friends and I a lift into Bangkok in their company van.
In the space of only a few hours we had enjoyed Thai hospitality at its best, thanks to those airline crews.
City of Three Mists
During the following decade, I flew THAI quite regularly. Admittedly, most domestic travel was by train (sedate) or bus (terrifying), but on occasions a flight was the only option.
In the early 1970s, colleague Peter Finucane and I took a THAI domestic flight from Chiang Mai to Mae Hong Son (City of Three Mists) as the alternative road route consumed an entire day. The names on our boarding passes read “Mr Peter Roger” and “Mr Roger Peter”, which did not exactly inspire confidence, but it was 40 years ago.
Our plane was an old Dakota which had seen better times. You really knew you were flying and it was bit of a white knuckle ride with the mountains not far below.
Landing at Mae Hong Son was an experience in itself. With mountains close at hand, guide books call the approach “scenic”, but if the weather is uncooperative, scenic rapidly transforms into scary.
However, our landing was as smooth as could have been expected.
We had gone to Mae Hong Son because it was regarded as the remotest province. It lived up to its reputation too, in the nicest possible way: peaceful and blissfully free of tourists. I suspect the only eyesores were Peter and myself.
Frankly speaking
On a THAI domestic flight to Phuket in 2005, I recall a slightly dodgy landing with the plane bouncing down the tarmac like an uncoordinated kangaroo.
The Thai captain came over the intercom and apologised for the landing. I think the passengers were expecting him to blame the weather.
Instead he announced in humble fashion: “I am sorry about that landing. It was totally my fault. I made a mistake.
“I am really sorry and I hope everyone is OK.”
After which, there was a slight pause before he added: “I hope you will enjoy flying with me next time,” prompting considerable mirth amongst the passengers.
Cool reception
THAI flight attendants have had to put up with a lot over the years. There was an infamous case in the 1990s when a government minister suggested the hostesses were not pretty enough.
He backed up his stance with the statement: “Intelligent women tend to be not good looking.”
It will come as no surprise that this did not go down too well, especially amongst intelligent women.
He sunk deeper in the mire by arguing that air hostesses should be selected on their beauty alone, regardless of whether they had the IQ of a geranium. Well, he was a politician.
In another incident in the 1990s, an air-conditioning advertisement on Thai TV had the flight crews seething. The ad featured attractive ladies dressed as air hostesses with the final shot showing an “air hostess” standing seductively in front of an air-conditioner with the less than subtle punchline: “Do you sleep with air?”
The hostesses were also unhappy with the television soap opera Songkhram Nang Fah (The Air Hostess War). It was a typical Thai soap with lots of blubbering, shouting and screaming which the real hostesses would have done best to ignore. As it was, their protest made the soap even more popular.
Paint it black
The nervousness of the airline’s executives in recent times was all too apparent following an incident in September 2013, when one of its planes slid off the runway at Suvarnabhumi. The incident would have been limited to a small news filler had not someone in authority ordered staff to paint out the aircraft’s markings and logo in black in a futile bid to conceal the airline’s identity.
All the paint job succeeded in doing was make headlines around the world, ensuring far more PR damage than the original incident ever warranted.
Boredom or terror
I admit that my main concern when getting on a plane is that I get off at the other end, preferably in one piece. Anything else is a bonus.
Orson Welles once commented: “There are two emotions on a plane: boredom or terror.”
Give me boredom any time.