“We were flying over as a group. I think roughly three people had other means to get there, more directly. Gaudino didn’t fly with us. He flew separately, to get there before us. So fourteen of us were flying, the Williams Travel Bureau had set this up and we flew from New York to Amsterdam on KLM, and that was great and delicious food, I mean tourist class but KLM was great, certainly, in those days. We took the train down to Brussels and we were flying from Brussels to Bombay via Cairo and Aden, on BASCO–the name, BASCO stands for Brothers Air Service Company. The brothers were Adenese, the pilots were ex-French World War II pilots. I remember being at the airport when three of us overheard the on-site manager for BASCO talking on the phone. Actually he was talking rather loudly. And everybody else was Indian. And everybody, all these other Indians had gigantic shopping bags, filled literally with televisions. I mean there would be a shopping bag with two TVs plus other stuff and that was only one of like three bags. And he’s saying on the phone, in a high pitch, “We are overweight. We will crash.” His exact words. So we were a little concerned and he asked for volunteers and actually the only volunteers were about a third to half of our group because oh, well, I guess the incentive was you wouldn’t die, less likely to die. But I guess I was more of whatever, more risk-taking person, and I decided to stay on the BASCO flight. Also because I knew we would get to India first and I just was excited to get there.

We continued on to Bombay and I remember we just refueled in Aden. It was really my first experience in a sense of the mysterious East because we landed in the middle of the night to a room with one rotating ceiling fan and one guy behind like the ticket counter. And this little anticipation made it become real in a sense, that this place of mystery, of things going on and just being very weird and peculiar.

–Dale Riehl '72