"My son, our youngest, wasn't born yet, but the twins were infants," he recalls.
His oldest daughter, Bryce - "the movie star one" - was about 4, and she was sitting next to her father.
"I proudly thought, as a forward-thinking, progressive kind of dad, that she might like to try this appetiser sushi," Howard recalls, in a story he's clearly enjoyed telling many times before.
"She was game, took one bite and projectile-vomited all over my shirt."
"This was the first hour of a 17-hour flight that "turned out to be the flight from hell, because we were bringing all the kids, and we were bringing all the stuff.
"We had 25 pieces of carry-on [and] 25 pieces of checked luggage. I was down there pulling bags off the carousel, sweating, you know, getting ready to direct a movie. And I thought, 'When and how did this happen to me?' I didn't quite understand it."
At that moment, Parenthood was born.
Howard wrote the story for what became the hit 1989 movie and directed it.
Now, Parenthood is about to enter its third generation, this time as a comedy-drama, and Howard is on board again.
It remains his most personal film, he says, and "something I hold near and dear".
After the movie came a TV series, also called Parenthood, that arrived and departed in the 1990-91 season.
The 1990 version, which Howard calls "sort of a sitcom", was "just misguided", he says.
"Didn't work, didn't live up to the potential of all the stories and the characters as they existed in the movie."
Years passed, and Howard gathered acclaim for directing such movies as Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind.
He'd never thought of doing more with Parenthood.
Then Jason Katims, executive producer of Friday Night Lights, itself adapted from a movie produced by Howard's Imagine Entertainment, came to him with an idea.
Toying with ideas for a new show, Katims popped Parenthood, one of his favourite movies, into the DVD player.
"It held up so well, and it felt so contemporary," Katims says.
"I felt like it was a great jumping-off point."
But as he worked on the pilot, "it became much more than a jumping-off point," says Katims, who wanted to "honour the movie" and revisit its themes.
"What is parenting like now that was different then?"Imagine signed on to co-produce for NBC, and Howard joined Katims and the cast in introducing the series to TV critics in Los Angeles.
A drama with humorous elements, Parenthood centres on a sprawling California family headed by Craig T.
Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia as Zeek and Camille Braverman.
Lauren Graham plays their daughter Sarah, newly arrived with her two children after a failed marriage.
Peter Krause is Adam Braverman, whose young son Max (Max Burkholder) is struggling in school.
The family also includes daughter Julia (Erika Christensen), son Crosby (Dax Shepard), in-laws and grandkids.
Graham wasn't even supposed to be in the show, but Maura Tierney, the original Sarah, dropped out to undergo treatment for breast cancer. Howard finds it "unbelievably gratifying" that the idea born on that plane still proves relevant today.
"I'm incredibly proud of it already," he says.
But he doesn't expect to be hands-on with the series.
"It's Jason's show, it's this cast's show, and I'm a big fan," Howard says. - St Louis Post-Dispatch Parenthood premieres at 8.30pm on Thursday on TV3.
