that he even knew how to hang a few coat hangers on our cook. Even a pair of skis, something that people in the snow-poor country had not seen at all up to that point, he flogged to a junk dealer for a lot of money, in whose shop we saw them years later in memory of our friend. In the early years, for the crews, flying in Asia was no pleasure. A thousand improbable difficulties appeared. In Iran, Shah Resa had started great reforms. The telegraph didn't work. Many, many months had been flown there without a weather report being available. The telegrams about this often arrived with a delay of days, as did those announcing the departure of the plane. Nowhere was there an airfield according to European standards, and it was often necessary to land in places where the military had just cleared the largest stones out of the way. No city had a hanger; in Teheran, primitive tents protected the wooden French machines to some extent from rain, snow, and cold, from heat and the scorching sun. Our brave metal birds have had the honor of standing outdoors for years and they have performed impeccably. But what a terrible job the ground staff had with them! In the summer the sun got so hot that by mid-morning nothing could happen. Technicians and mechanics burned their fingers on the metal. Work on the machines therefore began before sunrise, and take-off had to be confined to the earliest hours of the morning, otherwise the air, thinned by the heat, in the cities, which were already very high up, would no longer support the aircraft. But that's not all. We once spotted a snake on an airplane. Every morning we found with deadly certainty scorpions in large numbers under the tyres of the undercarriage, where they seemed particularly comfortable. There would not have been much objection to these gatherings, but the ugly beasts crawled higher. We were therefore not a little startled when we first found them by the pilot's seat. One can easily imagine what would have happened if one had hidden in the pilot's clothing and stung him during the flight. But none of this made any impression on our people. No difficulty dismayed them, nothing was impossible, their dedication was incomparable. And because the brave always succeed, luck was on their side. In all the years that I was in aviation in Iran, none of our planes had a serious accident, not one person, neither passenger nor aviator, suffered the slightest injury. And that's saying something under the circumstances just mentioned, especially considering how often each of our pilots had to make forced landings in the deserts. When a layman hears of an emergency landing, he will probably always imagine a bad experience. Too often he reads about catastrophes that followed one. In his opinion, the danger must increase all the more if an airplane in the desert is unexpectedly forced to seek the ground. But unless this happens in areas where wild nomads rule, or where rocks or large stones cause damage, such a landing is usually remembered as the sum of small, quickly forgotten annoyances and usually as a rather tangible loss at time. As I said, we chalked up a lot of emergency landings. Nothing special ever happened, thank God. If you're unlucky, you'll reach your destination badly tired by late evening instead of mid-morning, and at one point you'll be cold or particularly dizzy for a day, depending on the time of year. This is what happened to us on a flight from Diarbekir to Teheran, on which, instead of reaching our destination in ten hours, we had to make emergency landings three times in two days. We'd been flying for more than three hours. The huge mountains of Kurdistan and Upper Armenia with their large and small salty mountain lakes, with the burned-out volcanic cones, the snow-covered four-thousanders and the desert mountain valleys lay behind us. The Ararat ice fields disappeared to the north. We floated past the mighty Lake Urmia, far to the east we could already sense the high mountains of central Persia, in two hours we would reach Tabriz. So the worst was behind us. Because if we had gone down in the area we had flown over with its wild, empty, impassable mountains, the machine and probably we also would have been lost. You couldn't expect help anywhere. This time the worries were over, safe Iran was below us, the maps were reliable again, I nodded off. I was alone in the cabin and must have slept well for an hour in the comfortable seats when I suddenly woke up. The engine spat. Anyone who has flown often is awakened by the slightest wrong engine noise. Something was wrong with the engine, and indeed, with ours. The pilot and fitter were screaming in each other's ears, working on various instruments; the ugly noise didn't stop, and so I received quickly a sign that we had to land. We flew very high to avoid the glow of the near-Earth atmosphere, the big lake lay farther behind us in the haze of the hot July day, about fifty kilometers ahead I saw the
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