In the early 1980s I boarded Reeve Aleutian's Electra for a flight from Cold Bay to Anchorage, one that I had taken I don't know how many times previously. We taxied and then the captain announced that we were going to divert to Adak and possibly Shemya before heading into town.

Adak at the time was a major US Navy base and ostensibly the fifth (?) largest community in Alaska; Shemya, aka "the Rock" was a USAF base with highly restricted access. Reeve's scheduled Electra to those places (ANC-ADK-SYA-ADK-ANC) had gone mechanical in Anchorage, so we were the designated replacement. So our 620 mi. nonstop from CDB to ANC was transformed potentially into a 2500+ mile tour of the Aleutian chain.



We were informed after takeoff that we weren't going as far as Shemya, because the military refused access to a plane full of civilians without the necessary clearances even to land at the ultra-secret Shemya base (lots of Cold War electronics and probably some exotic aircraft there at the edge of USSR airspace.) So it was just out to Adak (still over 600 miles in the wrong direction) turning a 2-hour flight into more like six or seven. The weather was typical for the Chain, where we said it didn't rain locally; the wind brought it there from Russia. Seriously bumpy and annoying. The light load from CDB consisted mainly of fisherpeople and cannery workers who smelled like... but then augmented by dozens of USN personnel and families.

Insult to injury, the Adak kitchen had gone home, so we had to land back in CDB where Reeve loaded some meals prepared in the little cafe at Cold Bay run by the Flying Tigers airfreight base, who also didn't have much in the way of supplies for a now-full Electra full of grumpy passengers and lots of ADK people - crying kids and all - making their way back to the world.

The result? A yummy inflight meal of baloney sandwiches on raisin bread, a bag of chips, and a Twinkie. Just one. Bon appetit.