3 April 2015
Hong Kong
in transit....Kaohsiung to Vancouver
The 380 is an ungainly looking plane, it reminds me more of a whale than any other flying craft I've seen (except, maybe, for the 'beluga' which Airbus uses to ferry parts and is swollen up behind the cockpit to fit in the extra-large bits that the plane moves from one place to another around Europe).
The 727 was a beautiful thing; I believe it may have been the last airliner that actually looked like it should fly. It was swept back and sleek. I remember that when you sat up front, sipping Champagne in first class, you could barely hear it when it took off; Eastern marketed the 727 as its 'whisperjet' service. Funny that now, in retrospect from 20 or 30 years later, that era seems so gracious and, yet, at the time, I thought of it as a pale imitation of what must have been a truly elegant period when Pan Am's clippers would glide into waters from Manila Bay to Havana Harbor, from New York to San Francisco. How things do change.
