Bangladesh - All Together Now! by John Anderson (1973)

In May 1973 BOAC posted me temporarily to Dacca, Bangladesh as Duty Officer, while my new wife carried on flying as a BOAC stewardess on the VC10/B707 fleets for a short while longer. Up until a few months previously and it is hard to believe now, but BOAC could legally require their stewardesses to resign from flying if they married! Needless to say I am sure that there had been plenty of clandestine marriages in the airline over the previous years.
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> in late 1971 there had been a devastating independence war, closely followed by a series of natural disasters in what was a desperately poor country. At the time there was a large number of aid workers in the country and numerous charter flights carrying inbound cargo on a daily basis. The country was desperate for any aid and the proper scheduling of aircraft movements into the airport was virtually non existent. Dacca International Airport was in a bad state with war damaged facilities, this included filled in bomb craters on the main runway and taxiways, bullet holes in the terminal walls, broken windows and a complete lack of basic ground handling equipment. At times the relatively small aircraft ramp area could became very congested.
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> BOAC’s Super VC10 services operated via Calcutta twice weekly and terminated/turned around in Dacca. Calcutta positioned a BOAC ground engineer on board the flight to handle the turnaround.
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> On this particular day our flight arrived a little behind schedule and was parked on the ramp area about 200 metres from the passenger terminal (no airbridges in those days). During the four hours the VC10 was on the ground the ramp was filling up. Immediately behind our aircraft was a Donaldson International B707 freighter, which was parked up for a nightstop, the crew having all rapidly disappeared to their hotel in town. Our ground engineer and I were becoming increasingly concerned that there was insufficient space for our flight to start up and taxi out safely without causing jet blast damage to other aircraft. Finally, after some discussion with the airport authorities and our ground handling agent, it was decided that our VC10 had to be moved into a safer parking position on a nearby taxiway. Simple solution, but how to do it? There was no aircraft tug in the whole country! BOAC had previously positioned a VC10 tow bar in a small engineering store at the airport but there was nothing to attach to it. The handling agent had only a few small agricultural tractors used for towing baggage trolleys. However a cunning plan was formed, making use of the abundant manpower available and a decrepit open backed ex army truck normally used for carrying cargo.

Dozens of cargo/baggage loaders and engineering staff were gathered together and received a quick mass briefing on the ramp; the message was simple, the Bangladeshi equivalent of “You are all going to push/pull the BOAC aircraft forward on the count of 3.” The towbar was attached to the nose wheel and the other end was somehow hooked onto the truck. Stout ropes were attached to the VC10’s main undercarriage and after much shouting and commotion the VC10 began to move slowly to a position on the taxiway, where refuelling and loading were completed. Job done!
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