Saturday, August 2, 2014
Yellowthread Street (TV Series) - Bruce Payne (1990) - Kai Tak Airport, Kowloon
A slightly different view of the airport for a change, including shots of what I guess was the old dropping off point (I can't remember myself, it's been too long and, regrettably, I never paid much attention to these things back then). Anyway, enjoy the nostalgia from Key Witness as Marenta (Robert Taylor) heads to Kai Tak to try and get the witness's wife before she gets on the plane.
2 comments:
Yes, that's the old dropping off point outside departures (screen right) and the car park (screen left).
The final screenshot is in the now-demolished pedestrian overpass between the then-Regal Airport Hotel, now-Regal Oriental Kowloon City. At screen left is a baggage conveyor that ran the length of the overpass, so you didn't have to bother carrying your bags or rolling them behind you -- at least, until you got unceremoniously dumped in the airport car park. ;-) Given which side of the screen it's on, you can tell that the camera is facing from the hotel to the carpark / airport, and so they're walking towards the hotel.
I stuck my head in the Regal briefly the last couple of times I was in HK out of a mixture of nostalgia and morbid curiosity, and save for a bit of the lobby it looked like hardly a cent had been spent on the place since it closed. Yet somehow, despite now having absolutely *appalling* location for most tourists (20 min walk to Lok Fu MTR, 30 min to Diamond Hill or Choi Hung, and a long trek down Prince Edward Road in either direction to get a bus that's not heading away from town), it still commands surprisingly high room rates, and is packed to the gills with mainlanders who seem willing to pay them.
In the background of the first shot, you caught B-1838, a China Airlines Boeing 767-200 that dates filming to pre-1989. Why? Because she was delivered to China Airlines on 27 Jun 1983, and sold to Air New Zealand on 01 Dec 1989. She spent about six years with them, then briefly a bank or leasing company before running out the remainder of her career with Air Canada. Since October 2006, she'd been in storage at Pinal Airpark in California, a well-known boneyard.
http://www.planespotters.net/Production_List/Boeing/767/22682,N754JM-JMG-Jet-Midwest-Group-LLC-.php
http://www.airliners.net/search/photo.search?cnsearch=22682%2F60
In September 2013 she was moved to a military airbase in Maryland. Why? Who knows, but she seems to have somehow gotten a reprieve, because she was apparently kept in airworthy condition, and unlike many aircraft at Pinal, she wasn't scrapped there.
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N754JM
Oh, and one last thing. The airstairs you can see in two screenshots with the HATS (Hong Kong Air Terminal Services) logo on them? My Dad spent most of his career there. They also did the ground handling, baggage carousels and trolleys, etc., but they are sadly no more as they didn't get the contract for the new airport.
The internet: It's crazy how much information it contains. ;-)
Interesting stuff. Yes, pre-1989 or at least 1989 or thereabouts. The last episode (#13) called I Knew a Man has a famous HK actor it: Paul Wei Ping Ao who was also in both Fist of Fury (as the collaborating translator) and Way of the Dragon (as the gay sidekick). He died in Dec 89.
Great stuff about the plane though. So your dad was a HATS man. I bet he has a bunch of great stories to tell.
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