POPE JOHN PAUL II
TRAVELSflight, his arms appear next to the front door of the plane.
It seems that those arms are left on the plane afterwards as a declaration "The Pope flew in this plane" as seen on the out-of-service ex-Viasa plane at
The pope travel only in "Catholic" airlines. When he visit a "Chatolic" state he uses the local flag carrier airline to his flight. If there are more then one flag-cattier, he don't insult anybody and used all of them. In his visit to Mexico, the pope JP II used Mexicana on one way and Aero-Mexico on the other It seems that the pope emblem is not removed afterwards and the plane still carry it as a token and to show that this is a "papal plane". When visiting a non-Catholic state, the pope use Alitalia planes. Dov Gutterman, 4 July 2007
Typically, the Pope flies on a chartered Alitalia fixed-wing aircraft when travelling to or from more distant destinations. The tradition is for the Pope to fly to the country he is visiting on a chartered Alitalia jet and to return on a jet belonging to a flag carrier from the visited nation. But when touring multiple nations this could turn odd. For example, when Pope John Paul II visited South America in May 1988, he came to Paraguay from Peru in an AeroPeru DC-8, but left Asuncion International Airport back to Europe in a transcontinental Alitalia Boeing 747, which was brought in just hours before his farewell ceremony. Líneas Aéreas Paraguayas' longest-range aircraft at the time were Boeing 707-320Bs, which had to stop in Dakar to refuel. However, he politely traveled within the country in a LAP jet, which incidentally carried the distinguished visitor's coat of arms in the forward fuselage as courtesy. Inspired by both a biblical verse and the name of the aircraft used by the President of the United States, the Americans nicknamed the Pope's aircraft "Shepherd One" after Pope Benedict XVI's visit to New York and Washington in 2008. The call sign of a papal flight within Italy is "volo papale" ("papal flight" in Italian) followed by the number of flights the pope has made. Pope John Paul II made 104 papal flights.
Krueger, a longtime pilot for TWA, in 1979 co-piloted Shepherd One as it escorted Pope John Paul II in his first official visit to the United States.
The trip included stops in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Des Moines and Chicago. Krueger, whose passengers have included Sen. Bob Dole, thousands of U.S. troops and members of Saudi Arabian royal family, said his experience flying the pontiff still brings him shivers.
At stops in various cities, Pope John Paul II was met with masses of people straining for a glimpse, Krueger recalled. And up close, Krueger found the religious leader both robust and personable.
"When he'd look at you, a million bits of information changed between you and him in one second," Krueger said. "You could tell he was a real genuine fella."
It wasn't like other flights. Shepherd One, a Boeing 727, was reconfigured for its special passengers. You had the one big chair for the Pope, and then you had a couple of chairs that were almost as big for the cardinals," he said. There were "a couple of bishops and archbishops, and they had to have their own chairs of a given size to fit the protocol of their office." A table covered in white lambskin was set up for Pope John Paul II to read the Bible and take notes.