Photos: Flowers from Peermade

In Travel: Mist covers the mountain tops I had mentioned about the beautiful flowers of Peermade. Here are some pictures I took at Glenrock, Mr. Michael Kallivayalil's residence.










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Douglas DC 3, The Dakota

The photo above is of Lord Linlithgow, the then Viceroy of India and Lady Linlithgow alighting from a Douglas DC-3 plane at the Wellingdon Island airport, Cochin, circa 1940. On seeing this in the Lotus Club Platinum Jubilee Souvenir (Some Clubs of India), I was reminded of the old Dakota days. Till the Fokker Friendships were introduced in the early 1960s, Dakotas (the name given by the British to this American plane) served Cochin.

Those days we had the Great South Indian Milk Run, if one could call it that – a hopping flight, Madras – Madurai – Trivandrum – Cochin – Coimbatore – Bangalore – Madras. That is perhaps the maximum take-offs and landings a pilot was permitted to do at one stretch of duty.

Then there was the Bombay flight. After one and a half hours of flying from Cochin – cruising speed about 170 mph – it would land at Mangalore. Half an hour there and then on to Belgaum which had a camp-shed terminal - another one and half hours flight. Stop over of half hour again. Then the final lap to Bombay – one and a half hours more!

Later on, with Fokker and then Avro, the journey used to take three hours twenty minutes, perhaps the longest non-stop flight in India.

The Bombay flights on the Dakota during the Monsoon seasons were sometimes gut-racking. The aircraft would get thrown around all over the place. Because the cabins of these planes were not pressurized, the cruising altitude for passenger operation, I think, was 7000-9000 feet (against the service ceiling of 24,000 feet). And that appeared to be the favorite level for turbulence.

But the pilots were not worried. They used to claim that the Dakotas were so reliable and dependable. No wonder these planes, which first took to the skies in 1935, are still flying seventy years later.

They call the Dakotas ‘the plane that changed the world’. Quite rightly too. It is a flying machine that combines economy with efficiency and safety.

I left out one detail – for the five and a half hour trip from Cochin to Bombay, the ticket cost was Rs.150 (in 1958). Bombay-New York fare then by Super Constellation was Rs.4000.

Ends.