Xieng Khuang is a province of Northern Laos and its former capital was Phonsavan where the airfield is located. It was a large village while in 1953, the management of the radio centre located there has been transferred by Air France to SITA. To be clear in many activities such as tourism the province’s name of Xieng Khuang is generally used to designate globally the airfield and the city of Phonsavan. One could query: “What was the reason for an airfield and subsequently a telecom centre to be implemented in such place?” Well, it was less than ten years since the end of WW2 during which the Japanese army had occupied Indochina and as soon as the war ended a communist lead rebellion started all over the country. Since the roads were almost unusable as well as fairly unsecured, five airfields spread over Laos had been built or upgraded to provide access to the DC-3 Dakota planes in order to bring in the basic commodities unavailable locally. In Laos, and practically everywhere in Indochina, each small SITA centre was handled by a single operator living in a “compartiment” meaning a Chinese style ground level apartment with all the rooms built in a straight line from the road to the backyard. The room next to the street was the proper centre where airlines staff was coming to deliver or pick-up messages, while the middle room was the bed/living room for the family and the third one was the kitchen.
Standard radio equipment installed in each centre was composed of a transmitter SCR 191, a receiver BC 342, a genset located in the backyard near the kitchen, while the antennas were extended over the roof.
The SITA network was providing ground to ground services for operational and commercial messages as well as ground to air communications with the aircraft concerned. It was quite common for a flying aircraft to query the XS operator about the local weather at his own site or to ask for any other useful information.
The IATA 3-letter code for designating geographical locations were introduced in the late ‘60s as previously SITA was making use of the AFTN 4-letter code system.
As the three states of former French Indochina became independent each of them created its own national carrier. Laos saw the creation of Air Laos with the participation of Aigle Azur, then under the management of Gaston Floirat. Its fleet was made of Douglas DC-3 and Boeing Stratoliner SA-307 B1. The latter was a commercial version of the B-17 Flying Fortress which has been built in only five units, all of them have been used in Indochina.
In the early days of SITA the membership entry formalities were simpler than today and any airline holding an operating licence and meeting the required financial terms could make use of our network while the contract was drawn up locally. For that reason in addition to Air Laos a number of local airlines owning only one or two small aircraft were operating to and from Xieng Khouang relying on SITA for all their telecoms needs.
In those days the Xieng Kuang province with around 260000 inhabitants could produce enough food and local products to sustain the daily needs of its own population whereas manufactured goods were brought in by air. On the other hand, the province being part of the Golden Triangle had one valuable good for export, which was opium.
As the former Indochina, which was a single entity, had been divided into three states, new customs barriers were established and customs officers started to look into the new inter-states international trade. I still recall one incident related to that new environment. One morning a chief customs officer came into our Saigon centre with his men and we were required to show them the recent exchange of messages with Xieng Khuang. Their attention was immediately drawn by a figure-only message, which at least to a non-weatherman, was appearing like an ordinary Weather Bureau forecast. But apparently the Customs people had obtained the decoding key and according to them the figures were forecasting not the weather but the load of drugs to be carried in the coming weeks. Anyhow the airline concerned closed down a few days later while part of its management was arrested in Vietnam.
Following the Geneva agreements of 1954 the security improved and transportation being much cheaper by road than by air the former means of transportation developed rapidly taking over the airlines business. Within a few years the airlines’ regional activities had dropped tremendously and in Laos all SITA centres but Vientiane had been closed.
But peace did not stand for long since the US/Vietnam war started not so long after. The province of Xieng Khuang is bordering North Vietnam and the start of the Ho Chi Minh trail. It is said that Laos received more tons of bombs than Vietnam during the war, which is quite plausible since the HCM trail was on Laotian soil. Xieng Khuang was a strategic area coveted by both parties. Phonsavan had been partially erased at the end of the war.
I revisited the place in 1995 and I have recorded a short video attached to this memo. It is not of excellent quality since it has been shot with one of the first analogue camera but it shows the countryside, which had not much changed after all the years of war. Ironically the farmers were planting opium poppies in many of the bomb craters whereas unexploded bombs were laying in house courtyards. Even the archaeological site of the Plain of Jars was spread out with bomb craters, as for our small centre at Phonsavan nothing of it remains anymore.
When the Lao People’s Democratic Republic was established many people, especially foreigners, left the country. A Frenchman born in Laos, Claude Vincent, decided to remain on site even if he had to attend all mandatory political seminars and so on. He managed to work as a commercial liaison agent between Laos and Europe. Thank to his help we managed to import all necessary technical supplies and to maintain the Vientiane centre operating without interruption until the economic reforms promulgated in 1986 under the name of “new economic mechanism” were implemented, the Lao government following in that field China and Vietnam economic models.
The man escorting my wife and I in the video was C. Vincent’s direct assistant. Unfortunately Claude himself was killed not long after by what the police called an attack by “armed bandits”. As a matter of facts when the French left Laos after the Geneva agreements those men who had served in the French army were given the option to leave the country and have settled in French Guyana were they form a small community. At the end of the US/Vietnam war the situation was extremely confused. In the early ‘70s the “secret army” trained and paid by the CIA numbered 30.000 men the majority being from the Hmong minority, but in 1975 the confusion was extreme while some of the men were leaving for the US, others joined the new government, some were sustained by others parties and so on. What is certain is that a relatively small number of soldiers found themselves with a gun and no resources and banditry became a problem. It took years for the government, who wanted to develop tourism, to succeed in solving it.
In 2013, going down the Mekong Valley from Yunnan in China to Sadec in South Vietnam I went across Laos from north to south. While sailing through the Thousand Islands the sight in a temple of the cinerary urn of C.Vincent brought back to my memory the harsh conditions of Laos in the previous century whereas by now I could see foreign tourists travelling alone and mounted on bicycles visiting villages lost in the middle of mountains or jungle. All we can wish is that the pacific and friendly Lao will enjoy as long as possible the state of peace that their country has finally recovered.
Herewith a link to a video on the Xieng Khuang centre: Xieng Khuang area
Bernard Leroy
