Hazard #5: Myanmar Air Travel
Air KBZ seemed like a good enough airline, with comely stewardesses, seats that recline and hot tea served carefully. The two Air KBZ flights I took passed more or less uneventfully from Rangoon to Mandalay to Myitkyina. Considering that Myitkyina is the army’s northern outpost in the Kachin civil war, the flight may have been the safest part of the whole trip.
And yet.
Air KBZ is an uniquely Myanmar company, a sort of cronyopoly under the wing of the Kanbawza Industrial group which is a subsidiary of the delightfully named Myanmar Billions Group. It’s the kind of name you choose for your company if you’re the kind of man that owner Aung Ko Win is: a friend of crooked generals, a man elbow-deep in the jade-sapphire-ruby-gold trade, a man whose ties to the junta have landed him on international blacklists. None of those qualities promise Teutonic efficiency in airline management, and sure enough, two months after my flight, an Air KBZ plane crashed upon landing in Thandwe. It was the same type of plane—an ATR-72-500—that I was on, and although it’s not certain, there’s a decent chance that it was the exact plane I was on: there are only three aircraft in all of Air KBZ’s fleet. Yet another private Myanmar carrier, Air Bagan, had one of its planes crash this week near Inle Lake, and it just has us thinking of all those little rides in all those little planes in all those little countries that have passed for us, somehow, without incident.
From R&K’s Ten Hazards of 2012
Source: roadsandkingdoms.com
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