ONE could toss a coin to determine Cathy Pacific's exact place of birth. There are two obvious choices. Shanghai in 1946 is one possibility - that is where Roy Farrell, the godfather of Cathay, began commercial air operations with his DC-3, 'Betsy' ('my baby' as he called her), the pygmy ancestor of today's family of flying Titans.
Hong Kong is the other - there Farrell's first handful of aircraft achieved adulthood as 'Cathay Pacific Airways', and there the airline first drew the attention of rich and important suitors. In a dilapidated Hong Kong painfully recuperating from Japanese occupation and World War II, Cathay was 'discovered' and launched to fame and fortune rather as Lana Turner was 'spotted' and shot to stardom from Schwab's drugstore in Hollywood - although in Cathay's case fortune did not come overnight.
Even so, the airline began as a gleam in Roy Farrell's eye in a remoter place at an earlier time. The place was Dinjan in British India; and at the time, 1942, World War II had reached a point when circumstances were at their bleakest.
That year was the worse of times . . . The Japanese had closed the Burma Road, the most important Allied supply route into China - in fact, the only remaining lifeline.
The Allied commanders saw only one possibility: by air from India - admittedly no ordinary route. This one would have to cross one of the world's natural wonders - the uncharted barrier of formidable mountains at the eastern end of the Himalayas, a region of soaring walls of dark or snow-covered rock that soon came to be known to the world as the 'Hump'.
At the Indian end of the Hump, British and Americans set up their headquarters in Calcutta, the largest port in eastern India, and looked for air fields . . . Dinjan it would be, and by the time Roy Farrell was posted there it had become a noisy, overcrowded home-from-home for aircraft and aircrews from both the American Army Air Corps' Transport Command (ATC) and the hybrid China National Aviation Company (CNAC).