The sign-board outside an office of the national airline, Biman Bangladesh, always gives me a chuckle when I pass it on my way into the office:
“Press, Medical Centre and Poultry Complex.”
It always makes me wonder why they put their doctors, press officers and chicken farmers all in the same place. I assume they don’t actually keep their chickens there as well.
Anyway, it must have been absolute panic in that office when Bangladesh’s first outbreak of bird flu was detected on a Biman chicken farm in 2007.
This incident (which in the long run could have a terrible impact on Bangladesh) raises several questions:
Why does an airline need to have chicken farms?
Does the health of an airline’s chickens correlate in any way to the condition of their planes?
Are the pink bits on the dry lumps of chicken tikka they serve on every flight, blood or seasoning?
Biman’s website says it set up a poultry business in 1976 to subsidise the rest of its business – which had started out only a month after the country’s bloody war of independence had ended. Its first plane was a World War II-era Dakota.
Another Biman sign, this time inside the front door of its headquarters, tells pilots on their way to the airport to “hold their nerve.” Good advice for all of us!
