Flight 714 to Sydney (; originally published in English as Flight 714) is the twenty-second volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. It was serialised weekly from September 1966 to November 1967 in Tintin magazine. The title refers to a flight that Tintin and his friends fail to catch, as they become embroiled in their arch-nemesis Rastapopoulos' plot to kidnap an eccentric millionaire from a supersonic business jet on a Sondonesian island.
Hergé started work on Flight 714 to Sydney four years after the completion of his previous Adventure, The Castafiore Emerald. At this point in his life, he was increasingly uninterested in the series, and used the story to explore the paranormal phenomena that deeply fascinated him. After its serialisation in Tintin magazine, the story was collected for publication in book form by Casterman in 1968. Although noted for its highly-detailed artwork, critical reception of Flight 714 to Sydney has been mixed to negative, with its narrative being criticised by commentators for the farcical portrayal of its antagonists, the nescience of its protagonists, and for leaving its central mystery unresolved. Hergé continued The Adventures of Tintin with Tintin and the Picaros, while the series itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition. The story was adapted for the 1991 animated Ellipse/Nelvana series The Adventures of Tintin.
Synopsis
During a refueling stop at Kemajoran Airport, Jakarta en route to an international space exploration conference in Sydney, Australia (as guests of honor for being the first men on the Moon), Tintin, his dog Snowy, and their friends Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus chance upon their old acquaintance Skut (introduced in The Red Sea Sharks). Skut is now the personal pilot for aircraft industrialist and eccentric millionaire Laszlo Carreidas, who is also attending the conference. Tintin and his friends join Carreidas on his prototype private jet, the Carreidas 160, crewed by Skut, co-pilot Hans Boehm, navigator Paolo Colombani, and steward Gino. Carreidas' secretary Spalding, Boehm, and Colombani hijack the plane and bring it to the (fictional) deserted volcanic island of Pulau-pulau Bompa, situated in the Celebes Sea, where the aircraft makes a rough landing on a makeshift runway. While disembarking from the plane, Snowy bolts from Tintin's arms and runs off into the jungle under gunfire. The mastermind of the plot then reveals himself as Rastapopoulos, intent on seizing Carreidas' fortune. Captain Haddock's corrupt ex-shipmate, Allan, is present as Rastapopoulos's henchman, and Sondonesian nationalists have been hired as mercenaries.
Tintin, Haddock, Calculus, Skut and Gino are bound and held in a Japanese World War II-era bunker, while Rastapopoulos takes Carreidas to another bunker where his accomplice, Dr. Krollspell, injects him with a truth serum to reveal Carreidas's Swiss bank account number. Under the serum's influence, Carreidas becomes eager to confide his life of greed, perfidy, and theft, revealing every detail thereof except the account number. Furious, Rastapopoulos strikes at Krollspell, who is still holding the truth serum syringe, and is accidentally injected, whereupon he too boasts of past crimes until he and Carreidas quarrel over which of them is the most evil. In the process, Rastapopoulos reveals that nearly all of the men he recruited, including Spalding, the aircraft pilots, the Sondonesians and Krollspell, are marked to be eliminated after he gets the account number.