In the 1980s a young man named ‘Akilisi Pohiva emerged as a voice of dissent. He stood in public and railed against the monarchy. Other Tongans laughed at him. He thought differently than they did, and even looked different: Among round people with round features, Pohiva looked like a hawk, with eyes that gazed down either side of a sharp nose. He was jailed twice for speaking against the government.

But after years of royal goofs, Pohiva’s calls for political reform have slowly taken hold, culminating in open unrest in 2005. It started as a strike by the country’s civil employees, who wanted pay increases. But the protest grew into a full-on demand for democracy. Rioters overturned cars, marched the streets, firebombed a royal residence, and—unthinkably, in Tongan culture—threatened bloodshed.

After my first attempt to meet the crown prince, his secretary told me it might be a while before he would see me. So while I waited, I set out to see the kingdom. At the airport outside the capital city, a languorous clerk checked bags for island-hopping flights by Peau Vava‘u, the crown prince’s airline. “Please place your luggage on the scale,” she said, noting the weight with a pencil. It brought strange comfort, in an age of plastic explosives and sniffer dogs, that somewhere in the world an airline still depends on longhand arithmetic.

“And now you,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Please step on the scale.”

The prince’s plane, she explained, was “not new,” and so it was crucial that she total all cargo, from luggage to passengers to pigs. Out on the tarmac I saw just how “not new” the prince’s airplane was: There sat a gleaming Douglas DC-3, left over from the Second World War. Dwight Eisenhower flew in one when he was just a general, and these days they’re rarely seen outside museums, much less flown in daily commercial use. But the prince loves them. After a white-gloved attendant waved the passengers aboard, the ancient Pratt & Whitney radial motors sputtered awake and strained to heave us skyward, riding up and down the waves of wind like a ship on water. I realized, as ukulele music floated through the cabin, that we were flying aboard the prince’s favorite toy airplane.