Never Heard of It

April 13, 2026

I’m not sure how much of a bragging point it might be, but my knowledge of the world’s airlines is, I have to admit, fairly encyclopedic. Name an airline and chances are I can give you a brief synopsis of its routes, its history, and so forth. Inversely, pick any region of the world, and I can quickly name the carriers, big or small, that operate there.

Or so I thought. Maybe I’m not so good at this anymore.

I was in Palawan, a couple of weeks ago, in the Philippines, looking to book a flight from Busuanga back to Cebu. I ended up buying a ticket on something called Sunlight Air, which I’d never in my life heard of until Kayak.com told me about it.

Wikipedia calls Sunlight a “boutique airline.” When I hear that I think small, independent and friendly, with a dash of style. I don’t know about the style part, but the rest of it makes sense: Sunlight flies only a foursome of ATR turboprops. The price was right, the flight left on time, and the cabin crew were disarmingly cheerful.

I was wary at first, but maybe this mystery airline thing isn’t so bad.

And getting to ride in the ATR was a fun little throwback for me. You don’t see many turboprops any more, versatile as they are, now that RJs have taken over the world. I have about 400 hours of first officer time in the ATR, from my (brief) tenure at American Eagle back in the mid-1990s.

My infatuation with commercial aviation has made me knowledgeable about other things as well. As a kid I would pore over timetables and route maps of the world’s airlines, and through that process became a minor expert in geography. I can name the capital of almost any country in the world. Give me a city, a river, or a mountain, and I can tell you where it is.

Normally. I must need a refresher course or something, because that day in the Philippines wasn’t the first time I found myself stumped.

The other time was in Bangkok, headed to Paro, in Bhutan. The airline was Drukair, Bhutan’s government-run carrier. No surprise there, Drukair had been on my to-fly list for some time. What I didn’t know, however, is where the plane was actually going.

The flight to Paro would be making a stop. I was aware of this when I bought the ticket, but hadn’t thought much about where that stop might be. An atlas would suggest Calcutta, or maybe Dhaka?

But as I walked up to the check-in counter at the Bangkok airport, there on the marquee was a name — a place — that made no sense to me. “Gauhati,” it said.

I stared, wondering vaguely what that word might mean, or how to say it.

What it meant was a city in northeastern India. I’d later learn that Gauhati (also spelled Guwahati), is home to almost a million people.

And so it happened that, for the first and only time in my life, I boarded a jetliner headed to a city I had never heard of before showing up at the airport.

Travel is all about discovery, they say. I can vouch for that. It can teach you, too, that you’re not as worldly and smart as you think you are.

Photos by the author.