HISTORY IN THE ARAB SKIES:

Gerald Butt

Aviation’s Impact on the Middle East

© Gerald Butt 2011

The right of Gerald Butt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reservedNo part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from publisher.

First published 2011

Rimal Publications Nicosia - Cypruswww.rimalbooks.com

ISBN 978-9963-610-73-0

Cover design by Marcus ButtDesigned by Chara AdamidouPrinted and bound by KailasNicosia - Cyprus

For Amelia, Miranda, Marcus – and Edward,who landed unexpectedly during the writing of this book.

Introduction 7

Chapter 1 A Right Royal Occassion 16

Chapter 2 Air War on Several Fronts 40

Chapter 3 Breaking Boundaries 63

Chapter 4 Imperial in Reality 83

Chapter 5 Blot on the Landscape 99

Chapter 6 Lobster Mayonnaise for Lunch 114

Chapter 7 The First Arab Professionals 134

Chapter 8 Arab Planes in Action 157

Chapter 9 Aerial Crossroad 172

Chapter 10 Aerial Defeat 197

Chapter 11 Opportunities Missed 215

Photographs and Illustrations 233

Endnotes 265

Index 277

Table of Contents

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Introduction

The story of the rapid expansion of aviation during the past century weaves its way in and out of the history of the Middle East. The region provided neither the cradle of flight, nor the birthplace of its early pioneers. Yet aviation played a decisive and fateful role in the shaping of region – in the colonial years, the era of independence and the modern period. Air power, limited as it was, helped the Arab Revolt achieve success during the First World War. Aerial superiority also gave the British the upper hand in Mesopotamia during the same war after a number of setbacks at the hands of the Ottoman Turks and played a key role in driving Axis powers out of North Africa in World War Two. It gave Britain’s special forces the edge in a campaign against Marxist rebels in southern Oman in the 1970s; and it provided a formidable weapon which helped in no small way to hand Israel a number of victories over Arab states in the second half of the 20th century. It is not an exaggeration to say that the shape and the character of the modern Middle East would have been different without the invention of the aeroplane.

The development of civilian aircraft also impacted social and economic patterns in the region, slashing the time taken to travel between towns and cities separated by vast tracts of desert or high mountains. Traditional ways of life were changed overnight by the arrival of the aeroplane. Mecca was suddenly within reach for millions of pilgrims – from within the Middle East and also from around the world. Christian pilgrims, too, began arriving in the Holy Land by air from every corner of the globe. The search for oil and gas in the deserts and seas of the Gulf region throughout the 20th century was accelerated by the arrival of survey and supply aircraft, paving the

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way for the decades of prosperity. Fresh fruit and vegetables could be flown from Lebanon to the arid Gulf states. And businessmen in droves could fly in to share in the Gulf ’s prosperity.

That prosperity has been exploited in part to turn what until the 1960s was a remote and barren part of the world into one of the major hubs of international aviation. Today, vast new commercial planes like the Airbus A380, built with the major Gulf airlines in mind, carry businessmen and tourists from one corner of the globe to another and bring in the Asians who provide the labour to construct and maintain the cities. These airlines have names that are familiar in households throughout the world: no football fan alive can fail to tell you that Arsenal – one of the top teams in the English Premier League – play at the Emirates Stadium in London. Similarly, the sight of the Emirates logo on touchline advertising boards at football stadiums in South Africa during the 2010 World Cup is unlikely to have raised eyebrows among the millions of television viewers worldwide. The airlines of the Gulf have international reputations.

The spectacular expansion of the Gulf airlines – Emirates, Etihad and Qatar, in particular – over a relatively short time might give the impression that the development of aviation in the Middle East was no more than a by-product of the oil boom. But this is far from the truth. The roots of the first Arab airlines can be traced back to the 1930s, while the first aeroplanes were seen in the region only six years after the Wright brothers became the first men to break the barrier of powered flight. The Middle East has been steeped in aviation for more than a century – a fact that has been largely neglected by historians. The Arab public, for its part, has developed a cynical mindset in which developments as a whole in the region over the past century are assumed largely to have been manipulated by outside powers to the detriment of the indigenous inhabitants. So the achievement of a century of flying in the region is hardly seen as a cause for celebration. To some extent the cynicism might be justified: the extent to which the Arabs have or have not managed to exploit the opportunities presented to them from the earliest pioneering years of aviation is one of the themes explored in the pages ahead.

Introduction

9

Yet I believe there are grounds for commemoration, if not celebration. For the region was fortunate to witness some of the most important pioneering flights across its territories, opening up new routes to India, the Far East, Australia and South Africa. Tiny biplanes, piloted by a lone man or woman, bumped their way through the skies of the Middle East as they headed precariously towards new horizons. Many of the pioneers wrote about their experiences, providing vivid and historically important accounts of the places and people they met along the way. For example, in 1919, Captain Ross Smith made the first flight from England to Australia. In his diary he described the section of his flight from Crete to Cairo: “Weather again bad. Low clouds made crossing Cretan mountains difficult... had to fly through rain at 2,000 ft most of the way across the Mediterranean... struck African coast at Sollum, then flew east to Cairo across desert via Matruh. Hope to reach Damascus or Baghdad tomorrow...” In the 1930s, the French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote an exquisitely poetic description of a flight across North Africa that was supposed to set a new record for a flight from Paris to Saigon. He ended up crashing into the desert before he reached Cairo and being rescued by Bedouin. Accounts of this kind establish the connections between the aerial exploits during the various stages of flight development, and the land and people of the region.

For centuries before the Wright brothers’ success in achieving powered flight, mankind had looked to the heavens for inspiration. The sky high above was the domain of God and the winged angels. Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad flew on a horse with wings from Mecca to Jerusalem for his night journey to heaven. Christians believe that Christ “ascended into heaven” and sing of “Angels from the Realms of Glory”. The inhabitants of the Middle East, as much as those everywhere, had a yearning for a more elevated state of spirituality that translated, in part, into an instinctive desire to rise into the sky. In the words of one aviation historian, “human beings have always dreamt of flight... The flight to which humans traditionally aspired was that of the birds, a business of feather and flapping wings. To this the myths and legends of many cultures

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testify.”1 Over the centuries, many attempts were made to turn such myths into reality.

Muslims from the Middle East were among those who tried to defy the laws of gravity, including Abbas ibn Firnas, an Arab who was born and lived his life in Cordoba in Andalusia (modern-day Spain) during the 9th century. As a successful scientist, he turned his attention to the conundrum of how man might fly through the air. According to sketchy reports from the time, in 875 he attached some feathers to his body and fixed more on a wooden frame that would serve as wings. When he launched himself from the top of a hill he was reportedly seen to fly briefly before crashing to the ground and injuring his back. He never experimented this way again. Abbas ibn Firnas’ attempt to fly is believed to have inspired the pioneers of later generations (among them Leonardo da Vinci) who were obsessed by a desire to achieve heavier-than-air flight. There is at least one physical reminder of one of the earliest would-be aviators: an airport north of Baghdad is named after him.

In 1178, a Muslim citizen of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) tried to fly from the top of the Hippodrome in the presence of Emperor Comnenus. The aspiring aviator was clothed in a long and ample white robe, the folds of which had been stiffened by wands of willow with the intention that they should form wings. The story goes that while the crowd urged him to fly, the emperor cautioned him against the attempt. The Muslim waited until he judged that the wind was favourable and then jumped. Not surprisingly, he fell heavily to the ground, breaking a number of bones in the process. He, too, abandoned the search for a means of flying. Constantinople was also the scene, according to Turkish historical accounts, of a successful gliding flight across the Golden Horn waterway. Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi is said to have attached wings to his body and taken to the air from the top of the Galata Tower, before landing safely on the other side of the Golden Horn. Even if the exact details of the event are hazy, the fact that Çelebi experimented in this way is further proof of mankind’s craving to fly. Çelebi is still remembered: Hezarfen airport in Istanbul is named after him.

Introduction

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But surely these early experiments had long faded from the minds of the inhabitants of the Middle East when the first flimsy aeroplanes arrived in the region early in the 20th century. The sense of awe and excitement at seeing for the first time what had previously seemed impossible – a mechanical contraption carrying a man through the air – was as great on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria as it was in Paris and London. The Middle East, in short, was a witness to the development of flight almost from the day of its birth.

I don’t remember the first time I was taken on an aeroplane. I was less than two at the time. The year was 1951 and the country was Iran (or Persia, as it was called in those days). My father was a manager of the Imperial Bank of Persia (later becoming the British Bank of the Middle East), and my parents had been living in Tehran since 1938. My two brothers and my sister had been born there. A British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) timetable from 1951 indicates that the Canadair Argonaut airliner would have left Tehran (where I, too, was born) at 7.30 in the morning, headed for Lydda in Israel. After an hour on the ground, it would have continued to Rome for another refuelling stop. The Argonaut was scheduled to reach London airport at 10.30 at night, with passengers arriving finally at the BOAC Air Terminal in Victoria – an elegant art deco building close to the mainline station – just before midnight.

While I have no memory of that first flight it set a pattern that has continued for six decades. Flying and the Middle East are interwoven with my own history and that of my family as much as they are with the history of the region. Old air tickets, BOAC bags (the small zip-up cabin bags that the airline used to issue to passengers), fans, post cards and boarding cards that have survived our many changes of abode evoke memories the way that diaries do. Flying is in our blood. My uncle Frederick lied about his age to join the Royal Flying Corps towards the end of the First World War. He was stationed in Mesopotamia and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross medal. A clock my uncle made from the spindle of a wooden propeller taken from a biplane of that era (handed down to

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me by my mother) is my sole physical connection with him. My two brothers and my sister still talk of the flights they made around the Middle East in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. On at least one occasion, my three siblings came out to Jordan (where my father was working) for the school holidays, because a family photograph shows the four us on the tarmac at Amman airport in front of a BOAC Argonaut. My two brothers and sister are in school uniform ready for the flight back to England. I owe to them my lifelong obsession with flying which led, eventually, to my obtaining a pilot’s licence of my own. Carrying on the family tradition, my niece Alison is a First Officer with British Airways. As I write, she is – appropriately – on a stopover in Jeddah.

My early memories of flying and the Middle East are also tainted equally with joy and despondency. Joy at the prospect of the end of term at boarding school, and taking the train to London, the coach from the BOAC terminal to Heathrow and the flight to Beirut or Bahrain – wherever my parents were based at that time. Despondency crept up slowly at the prospect of agonising farewells at the airport before the flight back to London and then the long trek by car and train to the desolation of a town in the Somerset countryside. Life as an exile from aviation and the Middle East was not easy. But the thought that one day I would be at Heathrow again, boarding a plane back to the Middle East, sustained me during those long terms at boarding school. Daydreaming of flying was my escape mechanism – to a ludicrous extent. There was a hymn that we sang frequently in chapel that contained the lines: “Rank on rank the host of heaven, Sent its vanguard on the way.” In my imagination, ‘vanguard’ became Vickers Vanguard, a turbo-prop airliner that was in service in the 1960s.

Flights out to visit my parents for school holidays were recorded in a smart blue, stiff-backed book with the imperial-looking BOAC crest on the cover. This was the personal log book for members of the (at the time) futuristic-sounding ‘Junior Jet Club’, to which all very young BOAC travellers could belong. After boarding, the log was taken by a member of the cabin crew to the captain to be filled in and signed during the flight.

History in the Arab Skies

Introduction

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I also used an old school exercise book to record the flights I took in those early years of my life. I see that on 17 January 1963, I accompanied my father on a business trip from Bahrain to Doha. We flew there on a Kuwait Airways Vickers Viscount (registration G-APOW) and returned on a Gulf Aviation de Havilland Heron (G-APKV). I don’t remember how I spent the day while my father was working, but I do recall arriving back at Doha airport to find that the flight was overbooked. But this was not a problem. A seat was found for my father, while I sat on a wooden box at the back of the small cabin for the short flight back to Bahrain.

It was during this period that I first visited Dubai. The plane from Bahrain landed on a tarmac runway – but the airport building still wasn’t much more than a single-storey structure. In previous years, when my father flew to Dubai, the facilities had been more basic. As the small Gulf Aviation de Havilland Dove descended he used to sit behind the pilot, and the two of them would peer through the heat haze looking for the two lines of oil drums that marked the landing strip of compacted sand.

Two days after the trip to Doha with my father, the exercise book log shows, I flew back to England to return to boarding school. The Comet 4 jet airliner (G-APDN) stopped at Baghdad, Amman and Rome on the way – landing eventually late at night at Manchester because Heathrow had been closed by snow. I remember that my sister was with me on that flight. At Amman, one of the joining passengers was Crown Prince Hassan, the younger brother of King Hussein. I had attended nursery school with the prince when my parents lived in Jordan. At my sister’s insistence I made myself known to Prince Hassan who gave me a photo of himself with the inscription: “It’s good to see an old friend again.” The prince was returning for the new term at Harrow – one of Britain’s most prestigious public schools. I was reminded of the January 1963 flight while conducting research for this book by an entry I discovered in the Imperial Airways Monthly Bulletin of August 1927. The link, it turned out, between air travel and Arab royalty’s attendance at British public schools extended back many decades. The bulletin said Imperial Airways (the forerunner of BOAC) had had the

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“distinction of carrying on the Cairo-Basra service HM King Feisal and the Emir Ghazi of Iraq. Earlier in the month, the heir to the throne of Iraq, who was returning from Harrow accompanied by his tutor, travelled in the ‘City of Baghdad’ [as the aircraft was named] between Cairo and Baghdad.”

The Middle East/aviation theme continued for me after school and university. As a young reporter with the BBC I relished assignments that in some way involved aviation. It was my luck, therefore, to be sent to Algiers in January 1981 to await the arrival of the 52 Americans who had been held hostage at the US embassy in Tehran. I reported live from the tarmac of Algiers airport (where, for some reason, there was a strong stench of sewage) as the Air Algérie Boeing 727 came to a halt in front of the VIP lounge. Moments later, the hostages came down the steps to freedom after 444 days in captivity. Algeria had played a leading intermediary role to secure their release.

Flying memories from my reporting days do not always have happy associations. During the Israeli siege of West Beirut in 1982, as a BBC correspondent I was one of the many thousands of civilians who were terrified by the daily and nightly whine of jets overhead, followed by the thunderous sounds of aerial bombardment. Towards the end of 1983, during a lull in the fighting, Beirut airport was reopened. I decided to take my family to Cyprus for a break. We were just getting off the airport bus to board the Middle East Airlines plane when a shell crashed onto the tarmac. Along with the other passengers we scrambled up the steps. On board, the cabin staff propelled us all to the nearest seats. Faces taut with fear, hearts beating fast. The next explosion rocked the aircraft on its wheels. It was my three-year-old daughter who calmly pointed out the smoke rising from the tarmac a few feet from the left wing-tip. The third explosion was felt, not heard. The sound was drowned by the roar of the jet engines, which were being started even as we were scrambling aboard. The pilots swung the Boeing 707 onto the nearest runway and without stopping or taxying to the end for maximum length the jet took off, banking and turning out to sea as soon as it was airborne.

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Beirut airport has since been rebuilt, with a new runway allowing an approach over the sea instead of the slums of Ouzai. New and bigger airports are being built throughout the Middle East. Low-cost airlines are making air travel affordable to increasing sections of the population, building on a long-established tradition of Middle Eastern air travel. A British aviation writer of the 1940s, with the patronising tone of the day, wrote: “The Arab accepts the idea of flight as part of his life with the same practical philosophy as he accepts the ‘jerricans’ in the western desert instead of his traditional water-skins. Aeroplanes nowadays are sometimes chartered by air-minded Arabs for their pilgrimages to Mecca.”2 Today, the inhabitants of the Middle East are air-minded as never before – in terms of accepting air travel as a part of daily life. In this respect they join the rest of the world’s population in viewing flight as a mundane activity, rather than a spiritually uplifting one. On a recent flight on Etihad Airways I observed two Emirati girls as we made our night-time approach towards Abu Dhabi airport. The eyes of each girl were focused on portable DVD players and they never as much as glimpsed out of the window to see the tracery of lights on the dark backcloth below.

The wonder of flying in the Middle East may be lost. But its long, interesting and influential role in the history of the region should be preserved for posterity.

The pages ahead do not pretend to offer a comprehensive account either of aviation in the Middle East or of the contemporary history of that part of the world. The idea, instead, is to provide a narrative that explores some of the moments when they intersected. Where possible I have incorporated some lengthy descriptions and comments from publications from each particular era to give a sense of the mood at the time. For the sake of authenticity, I have left the original spellings of place names in these quotes and indicated their modern equivalents where necessary. I hope that readers will be tolerant of the inconsistency that results from this.