A Fur Raising Flight

We think that story of bears blasting into space was both amazing and inspiring. What brave bears they were. We think our stuffing must be a bit softer than theirs! We were pleased though, that with their landing site being so close to Ipswich, the Suffolk branch were able to be quickly on hand, to welcome them back to earth and proffer warm blankets and flasks of hot coffee.

Mind you, we think our flight out of Kathmandu, up to the Everest region, was nearly as scary. Our flight was to the infamous Lukla airstrip, widely acknowledged to be in the top 10 of the world's scariest airports. There are lots of reasons for this: the runway is very short (just 502m), with a big drop at one end and a wall and mountains at the other, giving no second chances to go round again; the altitude is very high, at around 2,800m the runway is frequently obscured by clouds, and if that's not enough, the runway has a pronounced slope, to slow down arrivals and aid departures. You'll see what we mean about the length and the slope when you see this picture of ours.


We knew all these scary facts about Lukla before we even left home, but what we didn't know until we got to Nepal, was that 2 weeks to the day earlier, a plane had crashed on landing at Lukla and killed everyone on board except the pilot. It was a real tragedy and, as you can imagine, it made us all the more apprehensive about our flight.

We were pleased to learn that pilots have to have at least 7 years's flying experience before they can land at Lukla. As the planes have to be very small to land there, we were able to get a good look at our pilot and we thought that he looked as if he had a safe pair of hands.

In fact, as we sat in the front row, we were so close that we could have tapped him and his co-pilot on the shoulder. See what we mean ....


In the end we decided it would be best not to distract them so we settled for a seat on the pilot's briefcase where we could keep an eye on what was happening.


We'll be back soon to tell you about the rest of the flight and hopefully to include a video clip (technology permitting).

Lots of love George & Yorkie xxx