When commercial air services from Britain finally reached Hong Kong in 1936, the journey followed, almost completely, the maritime “All Red Route”. This called into British Empire ports and travelled through (or over) British-ruled territories. Once continental Europe was cleared, Alexandria, Basra, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok and Hong Kong were all integral parts of a week’s up-and-down-and-up-again air journey in an Imperial Airways Sunderland flying boat.
Splash-down landings in rivers such as the Tigris, Hooghly, Irrawaddy and Menam and, eventually, Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong were just part of the travel adventure. Owing to the lengthy transit across dry places and frequent stops in oasis-like desert locations, the tediously long journey with the post-war British Overseas Airways Corporation, or BOAC, was wryly described as one undertaken “Better On a Camel”. Even after the Bristol Britannia, then the fastest British-made piston-driven aircraft, was introduced on the route in 1952, the London-to-Hong Kong passage still took almost 30 hours.
Cheaply available, American-built military-surplus long-range aircraft drove rapid expansion of international air routes in the immediate post-war era, in particular transatlantic and transpacific services. Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses could be readily converted for civilian passenger-cargo use in much the same way that pre-war German Junkers airliners, then used by Lufthansa and Sino-German joint venture Eurasia,.
