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     Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao Island, Republic of the Philippines

     Saturday, 5^th October 1996

     This was my first flight with Captain Chris, and it took us one hour and ten minutes, cruising at 33,000 feet, to cover the 423 NM (486.4 SM), using airway B-473 from Manila to Cagayan de Oro (River of Gold).  

     Which I discovered was a city that sat along the north central coast of Mindanao Island facing Macajalar Bay.

     The airport was on the south edge of the city, west of the Cagayan de Oro River, and had a single runway (010°/190° magnetic, NE/SW) with a length of 7,808 feet.  

     The sole instrument approach was a VOR to Runway One-Nine; all in all, the airport was a fairly basic, Spartan affair, restricted solely to day time operations.

     As for Cagayan, in a nutshell, this was its history:

     1622 was when the Spanish first arrived here, and ruled until 1900 with the arrival of the Americans.  In 1942 the Japanese invaded, kicking the Americans out, and then were in turn kicked out by the Americans in 1945.

     When the American and Free Philippine forces liberated the city, Japanese Colonel Fumio Suski, and two hundred soldiers, escaped capture by withdrawing into the mountainous jungle.  They were caught two years later, but only 38 had survived, in spite of their cannibalizing the Higaonon tribal people.

            

     At the Macabalan Wharf in Cagayan, one will find a giant replica of General Douglas MacArthur’s service hat.

     This is to commemorate where the General set foot upon disembarking from the PT boat that was helping him to flee from the invading Japanese on 13^th March 1942.  

     Four PT boats had brought him, his family, and entourage from Corregidor to Cagayan, where they were all transported southeast of Cagayan to the Del Monte Pineapple plantation’s private airstrip, which had been converted into a secret B-17 bomber base.  

Red Dots-MacArthur’s PT boat’s escape route. Blue Line-MacArthur’s B-17 flight route to Australia.

  MacArthur’s PT boat rescue.

The Del Monte Pineapple plantation’s private airstrip.

The B-17.

     MacArthur and his group were then flown in a pair of B-17s to Batchelor Field, near Darwin, Australia, on 16^th March 1942.

     The tidbits of history, dear reader, I kept stumbling across when flying in the Philippines never ceased to amaze me.

     In that month of October 1996, I did a trip to Cagayan with one of my screwball Aussie First Officers, and when we got on the ground for an hour’s break, my four Flight Attendants whipped out a birthday cake with my name on it!

     Serving refreshments and the cake, they threw an impromptu birthday party in the first class cabin for me.  The Filipino girls proved to be the sweetest, most thoughtful and polite ladies I’ve ever worked with.  It was the 16^th, and on that day I turned fifty-four.

The Rustic Cagayan Control Tower.

Once again passengers were allowed to wander across the tarmac to their aircraft totally unsupervised.

    A decade ago a C-46 freighter lost an engine and made a forced landing at Cagayan.  The company went bust, and the C-46 remained parked on the south end of the tarmac; whereby the local livestock made a home in its shade; especially the wild turkeys.

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     A Filipino Aviation mystery:

     It was on my first trip to Cagayan that I noticed a red, metal toolbox parked roughly four meters in front of my nose wheels. How it got there, and why it was there, none of the ground staff could tell me. However, as if by magic, that toolbox followed me to every airport throughout the duration of my contract.  To this day I’m still baffled.

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