Day 964, February 1, 2023

The Last Jumbo

The flight on a 747 I remember most was when I was five and traveling to Korea for the first time. We were seated near a bulkhead and a stewardess gave my mother a soda crate so my mother could put my infant brother down and rest her arms. 

Korea was still such a small country that people would almost always run into somebody that they knew, and so it was boarding the plane that my mother struck up a conversation with a business man and maybe he had gone to school in the same town, or his sister had been friends with my mom’s sister, or some game of five degrees of separation connected them and he invited me up to the first class section in the upper deck, once we were airborne. 

I did venture up the stairs. A flight from Boston to Honolulu is a very long flight for a five year old and I roamed the length of the plane as one could in this era before mandated seatbelts. But, at the top of the stairs was a velvet rope, like what you would find at a movie theater. I could see a bar, and that was about it before I was shooed away by a stewardess. No wayward little children allowed in this section. All the people in the Noah’s Ark-like hold had no idea what they were missing in the upstairs first class, and it was probably better that way. I had caught a glimpse, smelled a hint of nicer food, noticed the stewardesses wore prettier outfits.

In Honolulu we had a long enough layover that we walked outside into the warm evening air. On the elevated airport architecture it seemed that, if my arms were just a little bit longer, I would be be able to reach out and grab my mother a coconut. 

Later, we snuck into the pilot’s lounge so my mother could nurse my brother, and we were caught by a nice pilot  who made us sit on the couch instead of ducking behind the bar (another bar). I’ve been watching old episodes of Mary Tyler Moore and it strikes me that in the 1970s, perhaps everyone was drunk most of the time. 

After that, it was late enough I do not remember much else from the second leg of the flight, but my uncle bought me a replica of a 747 complete with little support vehicles for fuel, luggage, etc. Except, instead of TWA it was a Korean Airlines plane. 

There were still dirt roads on the outskirts of Seoul and my uncle took me to the great outdoor markets under tents that spanned football fields, it seemed. There you could buy anything, there were clothes, kitchenware, toys, butchered pigs, not yet butchered chickens. It is strange, but in my memory, walking to the market involved walking over a hill where there was nothing but grassy fields, and then in the distance were the span of tents. It couldn’t have been that way, but perhaps to a five year old, a small empty space seemed like a vast empty space, and if there were still dirt roads, there may have been grassy hills.

Similarly, the 747 was like an ocean liner, unfathomably large. How could such a massive thing fly through the air? How could a whole world exist within its belly where children could run the aisles while people smoked cigarettes and drank mixed drinks in plastic cups. I can’t imagine it felt romantic, at least in the less-than-first-class sections, but compared to today’s tight elbowed carryon luggage flying sardine cans, it feels that way.

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