Is there a celebration in a plane when crossing the Equator line?
- By
- Aparna Patel
- |
- 29 Jul, 2023
- |
Going from Ecuador to Panama on 1972, KLM gave me a button that said " I crossed the Equator with KLM Royal Dutch airline."
Indeed, I received a certificate from KLM when I crossed the equator in 1965.
It is in Dutch and it reads:
Bij deze verklaren wij, dat Jacobus Bernardus Augustinus Korten, per vliegtuig PH-DCE Thomas Alva Edison van de Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij op 9 April 1965 de evenaar heeft gepasseerd.
Translation:
We hereby state that Jacobus Bernardus Augustinus Korten, by plane PH-DCE Thomas Alva Edison of the Dutch Royal Airline, has passed the equator on 9 April 1965.
On a KLM flight from Buenos Aires to Amsterdam in January 2015 they performed an “equatorial baptism” – this is when a crew member is crossing the equator for the first time and a ceremony is performed.
I can’t remember exactly what they did (it was a large plane so I couldn’t see what was going on for most of it) but the captain dressed up as Neptune (with a wig and plastic trident) and marched down to the rear of the plane with the crew member being “baptised” and some other members of the crew.
After doing the ceremony near the back of the plane they returned back to the cabin.
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Definitely, no. Source: lots of own trips crossing it.
That might be the case of ships though. But how many people is still crossing the Equator line in a ship? Not many.
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I have been on flights a couple of times where the pilot made an announcement, but nothing more than that. Flying across the Equator in this day and age is a non-event, same as flying over the International Date Line or the Arctic Circle.
While it might be cool to someone who doesn’t travel much, it is not unique enough to warrant a celebration (especially not free booze ;-). Back in the day, when planes didn’t go as far and you had to hop from airstrip to airstrip refueling to reach Australia from Los Angeles, it was a big deal. But today planes do it in a single flight and the Equator is crisscrossed by a multitude of flights every day.
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Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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