RANSVESTIA

When the day came I left LAX at 11:30 p.m. and flew the red eye flight to Miami and got in about 9 a.m. I had to lay over for a couple of hours to pick up Air Ecuadoriana for the flight to Ecuador. Seemed a long way to go L.A. to Miami to Guayaquil, Ecuador instead of direct but it appears that direct flights only went a couple of times a week and I had to be in Guayaquil on Tuesday, Dec. 10th, so that was the only way to fly. (I went to Miami by Western Air and that is their slogan, "the only way to fly.")

About 20-30 minutes after we left Miami and after flying over a lot of little islands which I presumed to be the Florida Keys we started to cross a much larger land mass which turned out to be an island and I decided that it must be Cuba. Checking with the stewardess I found I was right, but I was somewhat amazed that commercial flights were allowed to overfly it. Maybe it was because I was on an Ecuadorian plane-maybe they wouldn't have let Braniff or Pan Am fly over--I don't know. But with their objections to military planes at high latitudes I was surprised that commercial flights at much lower altitudes were permitted. Although I would have liked to have gotten off and visited the country, it was that first step out the door that deterred me so I stayed aboard.

We arrived at Quito airport about 1 p.m. and stayed for about an hour before going on to Guayaquil. That is some airport. You are flying over lots of mountains all broken up by ravines and big canyons and no signs of any habitations of any magnitude when all of a sudden the pilot makes a really short and sharp diving turn to the right-(I was sitting on the left side and couldn't imagine what was going on because that was the "uphill" side and I wouldn't see anything but sky) and after a moment we had completed the 180- degree turn and straightened out but in a much steeper than usual approach we were on final. I thought we would take the roofs off a bunch of houses near the start of the runway we were that low. On takeoff later I could see that they extended right up to about 150 yards from the runway itself. On take off they have to pull up rather sharply and into a right turn to avoid another mountain at the other end since Quito is in a valley. Needless to say this is one airport that they don't land in in a fog or at night. It is kind of hairy.

We stayed there about an hour and I wandered all over the field and around the planes looking things over. They don't shoo you away

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