High flying days

Former Radio Officer/ Navigator, Air Ceylon and KLM, Don Lionel Sirimanne has certainly lived a life full of adventure, as Yomal Senerath-Yapa discovers on meeting this spry centenarian at his home in Kohuwela

The email to the Editor of The Sunday Times received last month was what led us to Don Lionel Sirimanne for right at the end of the article he had sent in, titled ‘An Unreal, Futuristic and Fantastic Dream’ was the line ‘The writer is now 102 years old, Former Radio Officer/Navigator, Air Ceylon and KLM.

We were intrigued. And so we had to meet this man who at 102, was still putting down his thoughts on his computer.

This week in his Kohuwela house where he sits neat and spruce amidst many a colourful memento

of an adventurous life, D. L. Sirimanne or ‘Leo’, or ‘Siri’ as he has been monikered fondly for over ten decades, gave us glimpses of his globetrotting days where he and his late wife Olga (nee de Silva, the first poster girl stewardess for Air Ceylon) travelled virtually from Timbuctoo to Toronto in luxury in the early era of air travel. At 102 years, he is the oldest living aviator in the island.

Siri was born in a hilly tea estate in Kurunegala in 1920. An ayah attended him and his siblings, and he recalls rambles to nearby waterfalls. They lived in a grand estate bungalow and early memories are of a sombre telephone in the corridor that always frightened him with its silver ‘eyes’ (bells) and ‘something that resembled a mouth’.

At age six, he was moved to Kotahena where his grandmother in long white dress and white gloves ‘up to the elbows’ lived in the then residential ‘hamlet’ that was a colourful potpourri with kovils, butchers, temples, markets, rickshaws and walawwes.

After schooling at Cathedral Girls’ School then Cathedral College in Kotahena where he learnt English, he became a stenographer (jobs were scarce then), and joined Carson & Company for the handsome salary of 60 Rupees a month. While working there he says trips to the YMCA gym nearby were routine and this love of

keeping fit is with him to this day.

The Second War which broke out in 1939 changed his life. On the Easter Sunday of 1942, Siri was washing by the well of their house in Kotte when, at around half past seven in the morning ‘a beautiful formation of aircraft’ flew above at about 10,000 feet. He heard the sounds of machine gun fire.

He recalls frantically bicycling to Colombo with his brothers where they saw smoking craters with crashed Japanese fighters at the Galle Face Green, S. Thomas’ Mount Lavinia, and Kotte.

Fired by his first vision of those fighter planes, Siri needed no prompting to apply as a trainee mechanic for the Royal Naval Air Services.

He has that knack for enjoying whatever comes his way, and he loved everything that life in the British Fleet Air Arm offered, down to the meals of ‘beefsteak, shepherd’s pie, kidney pie and corned beef ’ and the “Grumman Hellcats, Martlets with gun turrets on the fuselage, Corsair fighters, Spitfires and Seafires” that came in for maintenance.

After the war, Sir John Kotelawala wanted to open an airline and sent men destined to be pilots and engineers to TATA’s in India for training. Siri was disappointed to be left out, but was soon called to the Radio Ceylon Broadcasting Station where he became thoroughly immersed.

During his time there he recalls meeting broadcasting legend Livy Wijemanne and seeing singers including Devar Surya Sena singing Danno Budunge.

Siri then got to know an airport controller called Cyril Jansz who encouraged him to become an aircraft radio officer and get the Post Master General’s Radio Officer’s Licence.

In December 1947, Air Ceylon would begin operations. Siri was the second radio officer in the first charter flight from Ratmalana to Sydney- ‘quite an adventure’ he says detailing how, delayed by bad weather, they finally landed with 20 minutes’ fuel left.

He had a great time travelling on the charter flights to Jeddah in 1949, getting to see a Syria where women would striptease as well as the Arabian Nights’ mystique of labyrinthine bazaars and Damascus, written of in the Bible.

In 1956, Air Ceylon signed a contract with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and sent Siri and B. G. W. de Silva to Holland for training.

Flying for KLM – living in Amsterdam for six years, opened up absorbing times for Siri and Olga. It was six years punctuated by lots of travel and sightseeing. From the tulip fields of Elsmere they would fly to Germany, France, Venice, Vienna, Lourdes,

Athens and Istanbul.

In Paris, Olga in her Kashmir silk saree and gold created quite a commotion near the Arc de Triomphe and standing by, her proud husband was asked if she was ‘really an Indian princess’. Again, in the train from Vienna to Venice, there were exclamations of ‘Bella, Bella!’ as people peeped into their compartment to see the exotic sight.

However, he recalls too the unsavoury experiences in those Amsterdam years, like the ‘monkey flights’, where shipments of Rhesus monkeys – hundreds of them – were carried from India to the USA for medical research. With rows of wooden cages in three tiers and the floor sprinkled with sawdust, it was a ‘stinky’ flight with the human-like primates looking at them intently.

Once he found himself in a flight of hundreds of babies in bassinets only – to be told they were blue-eyed infants sold by poor Greek mothers to the USA.

With the advent of the age of the jet airplanes however, radio officers and flight engineers became redundant. Siri had to bid adieu to a career that had kept him ‘on cloud nine’.

He then joined merchant shipping where he worked till retirement in 1985.

He would take to the sea with pleasure and there were a few adventures including being attacked by Islamic Revolutionary Guards in Bandar Abbas in the 1982 Iraq-Iran war. He also sailed down the wild Orinoco River in South America, infested with piranhas, where tribes people would paddle their boats and ‘offer fruit, vegetable, fish and meat for cigarettes, soap and chocolates’.

Prompted by his daughter, Siri published his memoirs, titled ‘One-Hundred-Year-Old Aviator Recounts Pioneering Years of Aviation in Sri Lanka’. It was written for Olga, who however, sadly passed away at 98 before the book was ready. Today he is occupied tending to his garden and lawn, and watches TV and reads, especially detective novels. He writes on his adventures occasionally and has written fairy tales for children.

Having aged with grace, he tells me he cannot complain he is lonely, because his children and their families, in Los Angeles and Vancouver, are only a ‘click’s distance’ away.

Perhaps it is Siri’s inherently positive mindset, for he believes in seeing things from the sunny side – through rain, fog or hurricane, that keeps him still active and engaged with the world around him.