Frightful flights
Nov. 20th, 2008 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringPaul, my day driver, is off on holidays, a cabbie's holiday driving around southern Australia. He's been planning this trip for a while, but really it's very selfish of him to deprive me of his company while he goes off swanning along the Great Ocean Road with his extended family.
He finished early on Friday, letting me know beforehand so that I could start work an hour or so ahead of time. Very thoughtful, and handy for me to squeeze a few more fares into my shift. A few more dollars in the kitty.
Speaking of dollars, my first task on picking up the cab was to drive to Kingston, where I deposited the week's takings into the bank there. I was then in a perfect position for the beginning of the afternoon rush, which began with a call to Parliament House for a trip to the airport. I recognised the name on the job, and it turned out to be the same chap I'd picked up after listening to Obama's victory speech last week. He'd been inside watching on a Ministerial Wing television, while I listened on the cab radio, and we had a discussion about the inspiring speech on the way to the airport.
This time around, he remembered RingBear, and asked after him. I looked, and he wasn't sitting in his corner of the dashboard. I hadn't pulled him out of my bag, where he has a special zippered compartment all to himself. I retrieved him at the airport and sat him in his proper place.
There was a queue at the airport rank, so I went round, collecting a couple of passengers, who had just landed after a ninety minute flight from Sydney. This is a trip that usually takes well under an hour (in fact my best time from takeoff to landing is twenty-nine minutes), but apparently there had been some problem with the flaps on the Virgin Embraer and it had circled for an hour before beginning its descent. What made it worse for my passengers was the fact that they had attended a company seminar in which a retired fighter pilot had stressed the need to focus, and had described various aviation disasters that were the direct result of somebody taking their eye off the ball.
But they had landed, late and frazzled, and were looking forward to putting their feet up in their own homes.
Which was a lot more than some of the passengers I picked up that night could expect.
I was waiting on the airport rank about nine pm. Night was well fallen and the planes landing and taking off were distant dark shapes, a few flashing lights. But, the odd exotic VIP bird aside, the heaviest regular visitors are the Boeing 737s operated by Qantas and Virgin Blue. A plane landed, and I pricked up my ears. This was a different, more important sound than the little jets.
I tried to spot the arrival as it taxied in, but it was being held on the far side of the runway. There was a partial silhouette in front of the open RAAF hangar where the VIP flight keeps the two Boeing Business Jets used to swan around senior Government folk, but I couldn't make out the type with any certainty. Possibly a Boeing 767.
Before long, messages came over the despatch system about flights diverted from Sydney, which was closed due to storms. We're close enough to Sydney that we occasionally have some visitors in, usually when there's fog in Sydney and we're clear. They fly in, sit on the ground for an hour or so until the fog lifts and then take off again. But Sydney has an eleven o'clock curfew, and we were getting close to that. The only alternative once the window closed was for the passengers to be offloaded with their carryon baggage, taken by taxi to hotels, and returned in the morning to continue their flight.
Some people opt to hire cars and just drive up the freeway to Sydney, two and a half hours away to the airport, leaving their luggage to be sorted out later, but generally the displaced passengers accept the free hotel room for the night.
Canberra can be easily overloaded in hotel accommodation and available taxis, especially on a Friday night, so when the news came in about three hundred passengers on a diverted jumbo jet, I wondered how they would be handled.
But for now I collected passengers stranded at Canberra on flights from Adelaide and Melbourne. In each case Qantas organised a hotel room for them and gave them a couple of taxi vouchers, one to the hotel, and another back to the airport. This was a welcome bonus on a Friday night when my normal passengers were increasingly ratty drunks heading home from a night out.
As is so often the case with airline problems, there is a domino effect, with flights delayed because the aircraft hasn't arrived because there was a delay at another airport... The whole thing snowballs, and by the time the final scheduled flight into Canberra airport landed, it was after two in the morning, with tempers starting to fray. It was also a busy night in town, with people celebrating the end of the week, the end of exams, the end of a parliamentary sitting week. We cabbies were busy enough without heading out to the airport, and a queue was building up on the airport rank. And there was that jumbo, still visible over at the RAAF VIP terminal after several hours on the ground.
Finally, with taxi demand at a peak and shift changeover approaching, not to mention the storm breaking after hours of rumbling around the horizon, Qantas began to set the passengers loose, and the call went out for all the cabs to gather at the RAAF VIP terminal. This is a couple of kilometres past the terminal entrance and through a guard post. Normally we have to dicker with the guard on the gate to let us in for the rare jobs we'd get there, but tonight, he was waving the cabs through.
I got four passengers. The Qantas lady told me the destinations, but the passengers were walking dead. They just dropped their bags in the boot and clambered into the cab. Not a word out of them as I headed into town. They had just spent twenty-four hours enroute from London with a brief pause at Singapore to refuel, and then several hours on the tarmac. First the petrol tanker had been delayed, and then the tug to push them back had broken down, and by the time all was sorted out, they had no time left to get to Sydney before the curfew.
And then customs and immigration people had to be found to check passports etc.
So it had been a very long day for all concerned and their body clocks were right out of kilter as we drove through the storm along an endless series of roadworks. Welcome to Canberra. Welcome to Australia.
I'd been given four passengers with three different destinations, and when I dropped the first guy off, the one who had been sitting in the front seat, I poked my head into the back, saying "There's room for one in the front, if you want."
The three blokes in the back, sitting shoulder to shoulder, with a carry on bag or two wedged in as well, sat still.
One of them looked up, "We're used to it," he said, mournfully.
I felt for them. It was about three thirty before the final chap hoisted his bag and walked like a zombie into the hotel. He would have got to sleep around four, or possibly in the lift up to his room. Thankfully, Qantas set a departure time of eleven thirty the next morning, so they would have got a few hours of sleep before wedging back onto their jumbo to complete their flight into Sydney, seventeen hours late.
He finished early on Friday, letting me know beforehand so that I could start work an hour or so ahead of time. Very thoughtful, and handy for me to squeeze a few more fares into my shift. A few more dollars in the kitty.
Speaking of dollars, my first task on picking up the cab was to drive to Kingston, where I deposited the week's takings into the bank there. I was then in a perfect position for the beginning of the afternoon rush, which began with a call to Parliament House for a trip to the airport. I recognised the name on the job, and it turned out to be the same chap I'd picked up after listening to Obama's victory speech last week. He'd been inside watching on a Ministerial Wing television, while I listened on the cab radio, and we had a discussion about the inspiring speech on the way to the airport.
This time around, he remembered RingBear, and asked after him. I looked, and he wasn't sitting in his corner of the dashboard. I hadn't pulled him out of my bag, where he has a special zippered compartment all to himself. I retrieved him at the airport and sat him in his proper place.
There was a queue at the airport rank, so I went round, collecting a couple of passengers, who had just landed after a ninety minute flight from Sydney. This is a trip that usually takes well under an hour (in fact my best time from takeoff to landing is twenty-nine minutes), but apparently there had been some problem with the flaps on the Virgin Embraer and it had circled for an hour before beginning its descent. What made it worse for my passengers was the fact that they had attended a company seminar in which a retired fighter pilot had stressed the need to focus, and had described various aviation disasters that were the direct result of somebody taking their eye off the ball.
But they had landed, late and frazzled, and were looking forward to putting their feet up in their own homes.
Which was a lot more than some of the passengers I picked up that night could expect.
I was waiting on the airport rank about nine pm. Night was well fallen and the planes landing and taking off were distant dark shapes, a few flashing lights. But, the odd exotic VIP bird aside, the heaviest regular visitors are the Boeing 737s operated by Qantas and Virgin Blue. A plane landed, and I pricked up my ears. This was a different, more important sound than the little jets.
I tried to spot the arrival as it taxied in, but it was being held on the far side of the runway. There was a partial silhouette in front of the open RAAF hangar where the VIP flight keeps the two Boeing Business Jets used to swan around senior Government folk, but I couldn't make out the type with any certainty. Possibly a Boeing 767.
Before long, messages came over the despatch system about flights diverted from Sydney, which was closed due to storms. We're close enough to Sydney that we occasionally have some visitors in, usually when there's fog in Sydney and we're clear. They fly in, sit on the ground for an hour or so until the fog lifts and then take off again. But Sydney has an eleven o'clock curfew, and we were getting close to that. The only alternative once the window closed was for the passengers to be offloaded with their carryon baggage, taken by taxi to hotels, and returned in the morning to continue their flight.
Some people opt to hire cars and just drive up the freeway to Sydney, two and a half hours away to the airport, leaving their luggage to be sorted out later, but generally the displaced passengers accept the free hotel room for the night.
Canberra can be easily overloaded in hotel accommodation and available taxis, especially on a Friday night, so when the news came in about three hundred passengers on a diverted jumbo jet, I wondered how they would be handled.
But for now I collected passengers stranded at Canberra on flights from Adelaide and Melbourne. In each case Qantas organised a hotel room for them and gave them a couple of taxi vouchers, one to the hotel, and another back to the airport. This was a welcome bonus on a Friday night when my normal passengers were increasingly ratty drunks heading home from a night out.
As is so often the case with airline problems, there is a domino effect, with flights delayed because the aircraft hasn't arrived because there was a delay at another airport... The whole thing snowballs, and by the time the final scheduled flight into Canberra airport landed, it was after two in the morning, with tempers starting to fray. It was also a busy night in town, with people celebrating the end of the week, the end of exams, the end of a parliamentary sitting week. We cabbies were busy enough without heading out to the airport, and a queue was building up on the airport rank. And there was that jumbo, still visible over at the RAAF VIP terminal after several hours on the ground.
Finally, with taxi demand at a peak and shift changeover approaching, not to mention the storm breaking after hours of rumbling around the horizon, Qantas began to set the passengers loose, and the call went out for all the cabs to gather at the RAAF VIP terminal. This is a couple of kilometres past the terminal entrance and through a guard post. Normally we have to dicker with the guard on the gate to let us in for the rare jobs we'd get there, but tonight, he was waving the cabs through.
I got four passengers. The Qantas lady told me the destinations, but the passengers were walking dead. They just dropped their bags in the boot and clambered into the cab. Not a word out of them as I headed into town. They had just spent twenty-four hours enroute from London with a brief pause at Singapore to refuel, and then several hours on the tarmac. First the petrol tanker had been delayed, and then the tug to push them back had broken down, and by the time all was sorted out, they had no time left to get to Sydney before the curfew.
And then customs and immigration people had to be found to check passports etc.
So it had been a very long day for all concerned and their body clocks were right out of kilter as we drove through the storm along an endless series of roadworks. Welcome to Canberra. Welcome to Australia.
I'd been given four passengers with three different destinations, and when I dropped the first guy off, the one who had been sitting in the front seat, I poked my head into the back, saying "There's room for one in the front, if you want."
The three blokes in the back, sitting shoulder to shoulder, with a carry on bag or two wedged in as well, sat still.
One of them looked up, "We're used to it," he said, mournfully.
I felt for them. It was about three thirty before the final chap hoisted his bag and walked like a zombie into the hotel. He would have got to sleep around four, or possibly in the lift up to his room. Thankfully, Qantas set a departure time of eleven thirty the next morning, so they would have got a few hours of sleep before wedging back onto their jumbo to complete their flight into Sydney, seventeen hours late.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Wooohooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Date: 2008-11-20 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 08:38 am (UTC)When I saw you subject line my first thought was "Where's he been to this time?" so I was relieved when it wasn't you.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 10:47 am (UTC)and I love the comment about being used to sitting side to side for so long.
What a shambles.
Oh that makes three comments
oh lucky you have the amphibious car to cope with the rain
that makes 4. Shut up newk