Documentary : Afraid of Flying? Try Catching a Ride Aboard ‘Maybe Airlines’ to Sarajevo : Just getting to the plane can be humiliating, complex, perilous--and sometimes funny.

“Aren’t you afraid?” sensible people ask foreign correspondents as they set out for besieged Sarajevo.

It’s a logical question, as this forsaken Bosnian capital has been savaged by combatants for 2 1/2 years, and the bombs and bullets make no distinction between the Sarajevans who are their targets and the U.N. peacekeepers, foreign aid officials and journalists.

It’s a question that would get an unqualified affirmative answer, at least from me, if my natural instincts for survival weren’t so thoroughly distorted by the mental and physical gymnastics required to get here in the first place.

Merely getting aboard a U.N.-operated relief flight to Sarajevo has become so complicated, humiliating, perilous and unpredictable that putting that part of the trip behind me makes me feel like I’ve got the world beat.

After being bumped a dozen times to make space for anything from leotards to lentils, finally jumping from the open tail of a C-130 cargo plane onto the Sarajevo runway in a blizzard of exhaust fumes has the same satisfying “yes!” sensation as spiking a football after a touchdown.

It feels like winning the lottery, beating the odds, putting one over. And it even has its amusing moments.

On the surface, there would seem to be little to laugh about in the United Nations’ courageous, expensive and trouble-plagued undertaking to feed hungry Sarajevans. But behind the scenes, the humanitarian airlift that has fed this rebel-encircled city since July, 1992, operates like a black comedy crossing “Catch-22” with “Top Gun.”

The airlift is known by its pilots, ground crews and passengers as “Maybe Airlines,” operating under the proud motto: “Maybe We Fly, Maybe We Don’t.” You can buy “Maybe Airlines” T-shirts from a French canteen tucked behind a wall of sandbags at the airport. The “airline” brings together by-the-book soldiers and bizarre civilians, from swaggering Tom Cruise wanna-bes who pilot the cargo planes to Ukrainian ground crewmen in plastic sandals--even in winter. Then there’s the explosives-sniffing dog “Foster” who has the entire French contingent vying for his affection.

After 26 months in service, the operation is replete with stories, from the scandalous to the absurd.

There was the time a Canadian pilot bumped four senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization officers to make room for a Canadian television crew that planned a documentary about his brave flyboys.

A German journalist for an obscure dance magazine who wanted to bring in neon-colored tutus for a Sarajevo ballet school managed to get the Luftwaffe to up his standing to military priority with the contention he was carrying “vital cargo.”

French flight crews have commandeered relief aircraft to fly in personal stocks of wine and pate, and Bosnian black marketeers with bogus press credentials use the airlift as a free shuttle on which to transport suitcases full of coffee, sugar, liquor and cigarettes.

Journalists, who have the lowest priority among the soldiers, relief workers, missionaries, peaceniks and assorted do-gooders, often find themselves forced onto an aerial trapeze, swinging on commercial flights around southern Europe in vain efforts to get in the right place to catch the airlift that is the sole, if unreliable, access to Sarajevo.

How the white-knuckled flights come to impart a sense of accomplishment is best explained by the disorder and frustration that afflict each journey’s onset.

You set out laden with guilt, as well as tons of luggage. Spouses, parents, children, even other colleagues, act like you’re headed off for certain death--a prospect we correspondents try to treat as ridiculous so as to calm our families’ fears, as well as our own.

“You’re going to get stuck there forever one of these days,” my husband admonished as I set off in mid-October, well aware that the airlift had been grounded for the two previous weeks.

“I wish you would stop doing that,” my mother said disapprovingly in a phone call, as if going to Sarajevo were some kind of unseemly habit, like showing up at the dinner table chewing gum.

The logistics of getting there as safely as possible help you focus on something other than fear. To gain access to a U.N. relief flight, you must scurry across the Balkans to collect credentials, then obtain a helmet and flak jacket that together usually weigh more than 20 pounds.

The more experienced you get with Sarajevo’s deprivations, the more gear you consider essential.

Fears of being caught up in an intensified siege or being marooned by a prolonged suspension of the airlift compel most of us to bring in at least small caches of “backup food”: dry soup mixes, granola bars, peanut butter and the like. They can always be given away to grateful Sarajevans before departure.

You want a first-aid kit, candles, flashlights, a shortwave radio and heaps of batteries. And of course, without a laptop computer you’d be unable to send back any news stories.

Even with minimal clothing and the disincentive of having to carry everything across the Sarajevo tarmac at a brisk, sniper-defying trot, keeping the load below the 66-pound limit is a challenge.

The trip begins with the guessing game of choosing a venue from which to get in. There are more flights from Ancona, Italy, than from Split, Croatia, but the latter has the attraction of being within driving distance of other locales in Bosnia-Herzegovina that you can visit if the Sarajevo airlift is grounded.

For an October visit, undertaken with my Warsaw colleague, Dean E. Murphy, we gambled on getting in from Split.

The five seats allotted to passengers on each of three daily French flights are on a first-come, first-served basis, so you have to get up at 5 a.m. to get to the airport by 7, in time to jostle for space with the dozens of Priority III passengers angling for a seat. Then you wait.

Sometimes you wait for the fog to lift in Sarajevo, where it seems to be foggy every day until noon.

Other times you wait because the last relief planes came back with bullet holes, and airlift administrators want to seek fresh assurances--insincere as they may be--from the Bosnian combatants that they won’t target the aircraft again.

Often you wait because no one at Split or Ancona knows whether they’re flying or not.

Biding time at Split airport is an experience with the surreal. It bears a resemblance to the intergalactic bar in the movie “Star Wars,” with cocky pilots in their chevroned flight suits and aviator shades sipping coffee next to camouflage-clad Croatian policemen, homebound Bosnian civilians bearing slings and casts from medical treatments abroad, bearded black-marketeers skulking around in leather jackets and robed peace activists headed for the war zone to share the Bosnians’ pain.

We learned, after flying from Vienna to the Croatian capital of Zagreb and then driving for 11 hours to Croatia’s Adriatic port of Split, that flights had been suspended that Tuesday because of small-arms fire directed at the planes. The suspension lasted all day Wednesday, and fog grounded the airlift the day after that.

By Friday, our fourth day of 5 a.m. reveille for nothing, we should have been immune to the vicious cycle of hope and disappointment.

The airlift was operating. The weather in Sarajevo was clear. Even some military flights that had slipped in without passengers late Thursday had returned with reports of nothing untoward.

But the French air operations team emerged to inform our ever-growing numbers that their aircraft was being diverted to Zagreb to fly military cargoes until at least Monday.

So we repacked our armor, drove back to Zagreb and flew from there to Rome, then Ancona, where the relief flights were supposedly getting out without problems. Somewhere en route, my bags were set in a pool of fish brine because they emerged from the Alitalia baggage ramp with the overpowering odor of low tide.

By 7 a.m. Sunday, we were at Ancona airport, and close to 11 a.m. we were allowed to “check in.”

This involves having your luggage weighed to make sure it doesn’t exceed the 30-kilogram limit. Then British Royal Air Force police officers go through it, item by item, to make sure no one carries contraband. Your money is counted. Letters are opened. Your neatly folded shirts and underwear end up in a tangled heap.

After you repack, you sit in a small waiting room for word that a plane is ready to take off.

There was a lot of sniffing and seat-changing as the fish odor emanated from my bags. Most people would be embarrassed, but I figured it hardly made the annals of unpleasant relief flights. I once shared the ride with a planeload of seed onions, which gagged even the unflappable cargo crew, and more than a few hardened passengers have lost their lunches when pilots have soared into evasive action after being locked onto by combatants’ missiles.

C-130 Hercules cargo planes are like flying submarines, with strange tubes and equipment affixed to every inch of bulkhead. Lights blink, valves hiss, steam wafts from unknown sources and the engines make a deafening roar. The seats are simple canvas slings that hang down from the bulkhead, clustered up toward the cockpit with the loading equipment and around a mounted metal container that looks like a mailbox but bears the illuminating warning: “This urinal is to be used for its intended purpose only.”

Ground fire at previous relief planes can cause a flight to be called back right up to the moment of scheduled landing.

The planes take a gut-clutching plunge from their cruising altitude down to the tarmac, to minimize the time they are visible and vulnerable to ground fire. Ours landed fairly smoothly, and we gleefully leaped out after four pallets of flour sacks had been rolled into the sturdy arms of waiting forklifts.

Finally, seven days, two 300-mile drives, four flights and much stomach acid after leaving home, we arrived in Sarajevo at 1 p.m. on a Sunday, lugging our smelly bags through the wreckage of the airport terminal.

We were elated. We had made it. We had won.

At least it felt that way for the first few minutes.

Trying to Fly “Maybe Airlines”

Getting from Zagreb, Croatia, to Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, can take six days of nerve-fraying travel. Here’s a recent itinerary for two Times correspondents.

Tuesday: Drive for 11 hours from Zagreb to Split, Croatia. U.N.-operated relief flights to Sarajevo suspended due to small-arms fire.

Wednesday: Split. Get up at 5 a.m. Still too dangerous to fly.

Thursday: Split. Get up at 5 a.m. Fog grounds all planes.

Friday: Split. Get up at 5 a.m. All aircraft diverted to Zagreb to fly military cargoes. Drive back to Zagreb.

Saturday: Fly to Rome and then to Ancona, Italy.

Sunday: Ancona. Arrive at airport at 7 a.m. Board flight at 11 a.m. Arrive in Sarajevo at 1 p.m.