Flight 714

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Flight 714
(Vol 714 pour Sydney)

Cover of the English edition
Publisher Casterman
Date 1968
Series The Adventures of Tintin (Les aventures de Tintin)
Creative team
Writer(s) Hergé
Artist(s) Hergé
Original publication
Published in Tintin
Language French
Translation
Publisher Methuen
Date 1968
Translator(s) Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner
Chronology
Follows The Castafiore Emerald, 1963
Precedes Tintin and the Picaros, 1976

Flight 714, first published in 1968, is the twenty-second of The Adventures of Tintin, the penultimate volume of a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero. Its original French title is Vol 714 pour Sydney ("Flight 714 to Sydney").

Contents

[edit] Storyline

Tintin, Captain Haddock and Calculus are on their way to Sydney for an international conference on space exploration. While their flight makes a refueling stop in Jakarta's Kemayoran Airport, they unexpectedly meet their old friend Piotr Skut (see The Red Sea Sharks for back story), who is now the chief pilot for eccentric millionaire Laszlo Carreidas. A short time earlier, the Captain had erroneously taken the somewhat disheveled Carreidas for a tramp and surreptitiously slipped him a five-dollar bill (which later is taken by the oblivious Professor Calculus, making the millionaire laugh for the first time in years). When introduced to Carreidas, the Captain inadvertently shakes the hand of the millionaire's secretary, the tall, aloof Spalding.

Unable to politely refuse Carreidas's offer of a ride on his prototype private jet, Tintin and his friends join the millionaire on the way to Sydney. Carreidas plays Battleship with the Captain, defeating him repeatedly by cheating with a hidden closed-circuit television camera and monitor. Unbeknownst to Carreidas and the others, Spalding and two of the pilots, Boehm and Colombani, have been recruited to hijack the plane and bring it to a deserted island called Pulau-Pulau Bompa in the Celebes Sea. Skut is not involved in the plot, and so he becomes a prisoner too. After a rough landing, our friends are escorted out of the plane, and a terrified Snowy breaks out of Tintin's arms and runs off. Armed guards shoot at him, and a mortified Tintin takes him for dead.

A moment or two later, to Tintin's further shock, it turns out that the mastermind of the plot is none other than the evil Rastapopoulos, who declares that since "it's a bore to stop being a millionaire," it would be easier to simply take Carreidas's fortune. Accordingly, he has hatched an elaborate scheme to kidnap Carreidas and extract his Swiss bank account number. Captain Haddock's corrupt old nemesis, Allan, is working as Rastapopoulos's henchman. As for Tintin, the Captain and Calculus, Rastapopulos actually had no idea they would be accompanying the crotchety millionaire, but is nonetheless delighted to have the opportunity to exact revenge, and makes it quite evident that a very grim fate awaits our friends.

Everyone is bound and held in Japanese World War II-era bunkers.

Meanwhile, Rastapopoulos takes a defiant Carreidas to another World War II-era bunker and has him strapped to a chair, to be subjected to the tender mercies of the malevolent Dr. Krollspell. The corrupt doctor injects the millionaire with truth serum, so as to enable Rastapopulos to pry Carreidas's Swiss bank account number out of him. Unfortunately for Rastapopoulos, this plan quickly flounders. For Carreidas proves more than willing to tell the truth--about everything except the Swiss bank account. To Rastapopulos's fury, Carreidas launches into long disquisitions about his greedy, unscrupulous nature, boasting how he first stole a pear in 1910, at the age of four; shamed both his grandfather and his great-aunt to death; and has generally led a life of perfidy and corruption. Realizing the serum is defective, Rastapopulos becomes enraged, lunges at Krollspell (who is still holding the truth-drug syringe), and is accidentally injected with the serum, becoming intoxicated. He too recounts hideous deeds in a boasting manner, calling himself "the devil incarnate". This angers the still drugged Carreidas, who begins an argument wherein both of the two men boast, rage, and quarrel over which one is the more evil. From what Rastapopoulos says under the serum's influence, Krollspell realizes that the crime boss intends not to reward him as promised, but to betray and murder him (and everybody else, except maybe Allan).

With the help of Snowy, who is not dead after all, Tintin and his friends manage to escape the bunker in which they are being imprisoned and find the bunker, high on the volcano, where Carreidas is held prisoner. Tintin captures Krollspell and Rastapopulos and escorts them to lower ground, intending to use them as hostages. However, the serum wears off and Rastapopulos escapes, despite Krollspell's warnings; the doctor is released afterwards and continues to accompany Tintin and Haddock, watching the still irritable Carreidas.

Later, they discover, thanks to a "voice" Tintin is hearing, a hidden entrance to a statue-filled cave. Knowing that they are in danger, as Rastapopulos is gathering his armed guards to pursue and kill them, they decide to enter the cave and they discover a large hallway, leading to the inside of the volcano. They enter the volcano's core by triggering a hidden mechanism. Rastapopulos and his cohorts are not far behind, but they fail to find out how to open the secret passage. Instead they use explosives to make their own entrance.

Penetrating deeper into the volcano, Tintin and his friends meet a strange man, Mik Kanrokitoff, a writer for magazine Space Week, who wears a transmitter on his ear and speaks with a heavy Russian accent (he is the voice that has guided Tintin to the cave). He immediately notes that they are all in great danger, because the explosion triggered by Rastapopoulos has made the volcano unstable and it will soon erupt. They follow Kanrokitoff, who has the power to influence their minds, as he knows exactly where to escape. It becomes hotter as they find their way out of the core of the volcano, and at one point a large flow of lava threatens them, but they find a pathway up that leads to an exit. Fleeing the lava flow, Carreidas pushes Haddock off the stairs, but fortunately Haddock grabs onto a stalagmite, narrowly escaping imminent death. The strange Kanrokitoff uses his mind trick to calm the impetuous Carreidas down. Meanwhile, Rastapopoulos and his henchmen flee the eruption by running down the outside of the volcano and plan to take refuge in a rubber dinghy.

Once Tintin and his friends find their way out of the volcano, Kanrokitoff puts them all under his hypnosis. He uses his transmitter, and apparent psychic powers, to summon a flying saucer, piloted by unseen aliens with whom he is apparently familiar. The hypnotised group climb up a retractable ladder and board the saucer, narrowly escaping the volcano's dramatic eruption. Kanrokitoff spots the rubber dinghy and exchanges Tintin and his companions for Allan, Spalding, Rastapopulos and the treacherous pilots, who are whisked away in the saucer. The group - including Krollspell, who is later deposited by the saucer at his institute in Cairo - awakes from hypnosis and cannot remember what happened to them. The party is eventually rescued, but only Snowy, who cannot speak, has any recollection of the hijacking and alien abduction.

[edit] Missing pages

Hergé made an error when drawing the story: it was meant, like all Tintin albums, to be 62 pages long, but when he finished, it was found to be 64 pages long. Hergé's solution was to remove two pages from the end of the story, which covered the rescue of Tintin's group from the erupting volcano.

The omission meant that the reader now sees a cliffhanger. At the bottom of one page a reporter on a seaplane watching the raft holding Tintin's group exclaims (in the English translation), "They'll be boiled alive like lobsters! We've got to do something." On the next page ("Thousands of miles away, several days later"), the story switches to Jolyon Wagg's living room as his family watches a TV interview of Tintin and associates.

[edit] Influences

  • The story seems to have been influenced by the "ancient astronauts" literature popular at the time, in addition to the mythology of a hidden ancient city in the South Pacific.
  • Laszlo Carreidas is based on aircraft manufacturer Marcel Dassault,[1] although he clearly also displays some characteristics of another aviation legend, Howard Hughes (hypochondria, obsession with hygiene, hypercompetitiveness for example).
  • The prototype Carreidas 160, Carreidas swing-wing private jet, is a remarkable piece of design by Roger Leloup, at the time an assistant of Hergé Studios and later creator of comic strip character Yoko Tsuno. Though not based on any real aircraft, it does have strikingly similar design features shared with a number of different contemporary aircraft. The jet's swing-wings appear to be directly modelled after those of the F-111. The undercarriage pods are similar to those of Andrei Tupolev's jet transports. The tri-jet formula, merely an idea then, was implemented in private jet aircraft in the Dassault Falcon 50/500 series. Their intake geometry is reminiscent of the Rockwell B-1 bomber, a prototype at that stage. Other noteworthy features are the afterburning jet engines, shared with the Concorde, and a high set T-tail whose design is similar to the F-101 Voodoo.
  • Significantly, modern concepts of supersonic private jets also have triple-jet engines as their basis. Many aircraft designers who review the drawings of Carriedas 160 often remark on how very competent and finished the design is, and its practicality has been demonstrated in the form of fan-built free-flight and R/C models whose flying characteristics demonstrate a docile, swift transport which although never real, embodies the best in modern aeronautical design.[citation needed]

[edit] Trivia

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The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
  • There are several use of real Indonesian in this book, one notable dialogue depicts two of Tintin captors chatting while on duty about a particular Indonesian cuisine originated from Java, sambel bajak (ground chilli sauce with shrimp paste).
  • Karaboudjan, an avant-garde metal project band (one of Dan Swanö's many side projects), released a demo, Sbrodj, which is inspired by the Tintin stories. The first track from Sbrodj is entitled Plan 714 Till Sydney, which is the Swedish name of the comic book. Interestingly enough, Karaboudjan is also the name of the ship where Tintin and Captain Haddock first meet.
  • A Proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus) appears briefly in the book. Allan seizes this opportunity to comment on and laugh at the similarity between the monkey's and Rastapopoulos's oversize noses, wondering out loud, "Reminds me of someone. Now, who can it [be?]...", until he realizes, to his horror, that Rastapopoulos is standing right behind him.
  • The submachine guns used by Tintin, his friends and their enemies do not appear to be based on real weapons. For example, the drum magazine on Haddock's gun is strangely positioned on top of the main weapon, which would hinder aiming and the feeding of bullets. This is curious since much of the background, cars, ships, aircraft and other items used in Tintin's adventures were based on extensive research. Tintin's gun appears to be based on the MP40, though it lacks the vertical magazine. Some of the Sondonesians are armed with Thompson submachine guns.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Juventud (Spanish publisher of Tintin) (Spanish)

[edit] External links