Travellers' Checks | Emergency landing on remote island off Alaska a reminder of when airline operated ‘its own airport’
- A Delta Airlines flight from China recently made an unscheduled stop at a US air base on Shemya in the Aleutian Islands
- It was once a regular refuelling stop for Transpacific passengers and Northwest Airlines leased it for a time
Almost 200 Delta Airlines passengers travelling from Beijing (PEK) to Seattle (SEA) had an unexpected 12-hour stopover on Christmas Eve, when their Boeing 767-300ER made an emergency landing on the remote island of Shemya, in the Aleutian archipelago.
After a few hours, the Cathay plane continued on to Anchorage, where passengers were transferred to a special flight to Los Angeles. The Delta passengers were picked up by a relief flight, and reactions seem to have been mixed. “Wish I hadn’t left PEK” tweeted one passenger. “What a great story to tell my grandchildren,” tweeted another.
Although such diversions are rare today, travellers flying between Hong Kong and Anchorage or Vancouver in the 1950s – with Northwest Airlines or Canadian Pacific Airlines, respectively – would have made a routine refuelling stop on the island. In fact, Shemya featured on the route maps of the carriers (right), but apparently not on their listed schedules, as it was purely a “technical stop”. (TWA and Pan Am made the Pacific crossing to and from the US west coast via Honolulu, more than 4,000km to the southeast of Shemya.)
Northwest even leased and took over the running of what was then the Shemya Air Force Base for several years, soon after the Korean war, making it – according to Northwest – “the first airline to operate its own airport”. The advent of long-range passenger jets made the stopover unnecessary, and by the early 60s, the airlines were flying over what was by then becoming a strategic cold war communications and surveillance outpost.
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