![]() The Anglo-Persian Oil Company magazine, The Naft, recalled the story in a 1934 edition: “Having flown a short distance Mr Ritchie tried to turn round when, unfortunately, the aeroplane came rather close to the surface, so that on banking one of the wings caught a small hillock and, of course, immediately broke and the machine overturned.” His colleagues quickly ran to assist him, but Ritchie, trapped upside down in the cockpit, exclaimed, “Don’t touch anything, you chaps, take a photograph.” The locals remained unfazed throughout the proceedings. At about three o’clock in the afternoon, the flimsy craft took to the air. A crowd of employees and locals gathered to watch his first flight. A tenacious character, he assembled the machine, distilled his own fuel, and cleared a patch of ground to create a basic airfield. It was a bold move that surprised his colleagues and alarmed officials of the Persian government, who thought that “it would be highly undesirable that it should be used in Persia, where…the Mullahs might make trouble.” The airplane duly arrived, but the instructions were in French, which Ritchie did not understand. In his frustration, he telegraphed his head office: “Send one Blériot monoplane with instruction book.” Barely 18 months had passed since Louis Blériot’s famous flight across the English Channel. Ritchie was living his own version of Groundhog Day, caught in an endless replay as he rode up and down the pipeline to inspect and fix the leaks only for them to reappear again. The project had brought employment to local people, but such was their enthusiasm for the work that they loosened the bolts on the pipeline at night so that they would be hired to tighten them up the next day. In 1911, tired of inspecting oil pipelines on horseback, Ritchie decided to import the first airplane into Persia (today’s Iran).Īt the time, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was in the process of testing a new pipeline running from its oilfield at Maidan-i-Naftun to the site of a new refinery at Abadan. His words echo the thoughts of Charles Ritchie, a manager for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of British Petroleum. “It’s pretty useful if you are operating in the Middle East to know what is going on before you go out into the field,” British Petroleum technology director Curt Smith told Hart Energy in 2015. ![]() Drones equipped with cameras and sensors offer an efficient method today to inspect the vast oil fields of the Middle East.
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