Orientation and Comments

  Khatmandu, Nepal
Thursday, January 24, 1980

This travel logue will be a little different from my others. It has been created mostly to display some of my photos taken while flying the Pilatus. I have absolutely no pretensions as a photographer. In fact the Kodak Instamatic with which nearly all these pictures were taken was the first camera I owned. It used 110 film which I believe has been discontinued. It was just a point and click. No batteries or flash. Manual sprocket advance. Nevertheless surprisingly it captured some impressive scenes.

There will be little text in the entries proper. However, I have found notes made at the time identifying many of the photos. This will be contained in the Story associated with some of the photos.






Trying to place even approximate Map pins in either the classic maps or satellite hybrid maps proved almost impossible so Pins which are mandatory for each entry may be meaningless or very inaccurate.

The Pilatus operation was strictly day light VFR. Flying a single engine aircraft in those mountains sacrifices a measure of redundancy. Almost all flights were from KTM to primitive strips. The Pilatus was dispatched to strips too short for Twin Otter operations. They were all very short, at high altitude, none paved and most were one way. That is one end had terrain too steep for a plane to climb. So the landing was in one direction the take off in the opposite. Hence direction and speed of the wind were
critical. There were no radio instrument aids in the mountains and hills. There was an
ADF and VOR at KTM. It was the most challenging flying I'd ever done. Tougher than landing on an aircraft carrier.

The photos will be presented in no particular order by date. Am trying to give an overall impression of what this operation was like and the scenes from the air. Interspersing the really good photos with some very mediocre to poor ones. Quite a few I have omitted uploading at all.