Description
Maybe Airlines Passport Stamp:
This Stamp was issued at the Sarajevo Airport during the humanitarian airlift between 1994-96. Although it was not an official government stamp, the Norwegian U.N. troops that controlled airport departure gates provided the imprint as a memento of the historic, yet somewhat perilous trip, that traveling to and from the war torn capital had come to represent. In addition to supplying Bosnians with humanitarian aid, the flights were the main source of transportation for journalists attempting to enter Sarajevo to cover the war.
The flights became known as “Maybe Airlines” because of the arbitrary nature of imposed by a wartime itinerary.
on a flight manifest Sometimes fog or bad weather would cancel flights, sometimes gunfire around the airport halted all landings. One flight was even shot down by hostile fire. The stamp was
during the War in the Balkans. The actual airlift began in 1992 and lasted through 1996. It involved 21 countries flying 12,886 sorties, delivering 159,622 tons of food, medicine and supplies. They also transported 1300 wounded people. It became the longest running humanitarian airlift in history.
The flights were controlled by the U.N. NorMovCon team, a Norwegian U.N. contingent that worked with the French U.N. troops at the Sarajevo Airport to control flight manifests. They also provided the unique “Maybe Airline” passport stamps that were coveted by passengers using the airlift. The name “Maybe Airlines” resulted from passengers, ground crews, pilots and controllers who ran the flights but never knew definitively the status of a flight.
Sometimes flights were canceled because gunfire was targeting aircraft near the airport, or sometime fog or bad weather closed the airport to trips. There were so many variables that journalists and other passengers had to overcome to obtain a ride on a humanitarian flight that the answer the NorMovCon team would give to perspective passengers was “Maybe?”. The word was heard so often the service became known as Maybe Airlines.
