QotD: My First Flight

Do you remember your first flight? Where did you go? Why?
Submitted by Laurel.

The first time I flow was when we took a rare vacation as a child. It must have been around 1987 or 1988. My parents and I went to Peking (Beijing) for a week vacation and since there is no cheap direct flight between Hong Kong and Peking we had to travel to Canton (Guangdong) by boat (I think) for an internal flight. At that time Air China was called CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) but their schedules keeping was so bad that we joked CAAC actually stood for China Airline Always Cancelled. In fact, on our return trip from Peking our flight was mysteriously cancelled without notification and we got stuck in the airport (comprise of a largish brick house with no door and a long strip of concrete runway, I'm sure there must be a control tower somewhere out there) for 4 hours waiting for the next flight that may or may not arrive. The weather was brutal, think bitter winter wind in Northern China, and without any heating in an open brick house it wasn't much fun for that 4 long hours.

I was excited about flying and I kept asking my dad to take photos of the aircraft wing even though it was pretty boring. I was also very excited about airline food but it turned out that the mainland Chinese had a very different idea about airline food than the rest of the industry. We got served a pork chop in a paper box but when we opened the box, we found that the they had not heated up the food. So for lunch we had a frozen pork chop that could probably kill someone if you threw it hard enough. Needless to say, none of us ate that. Fortunately, one of the people on the vacation tour group had packed a bunch of instant noddles so we asked for hot water from the air hostess and shared the noddles among us.

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