A plane was taking off from Kennedy Airport. After it reached a cruising altitude, the Captain announced over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking.
Welcome to Flight Number 293, nonstop from New York to Los Angeles. The weather ahead is good and, therefore, we should have a smooth and uneventful flight. Now sit back and relax. OH, MY GOD!”
Silence followed, and after a few minutes, the Captain came back, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am so sorry if I scared you earlier. While I was talking to you, the flight attendant accidentally spilled a cup of hot coffee in my lap. You should see the front of my trousers!” A passenger in Economy yelled: “That’s nothing. You should see the back of mine!”
In the face of yet another major airline recently filing for bankruptcy protection — American Airlines — it gives me great pride to see our own national carrier Kenya Airways (KQ) continue to post profits, increase routes, grow passenger as well as cargo numbers and more recently increase fleet.
Performance aside, I truly enjoy flying the airline (when they’re on time) whenever I have to travel.
There’s nothing like traveling from a foreign land where the accents grate on your unexposed ear like a cat’s claws on a metal table and walking into a KQ plane in Amsterdam’s Schiphol or London’s Heathrow. It’s like coming home.
First off, the crew greet me like they are actually glad to see me. It’s not my bald hairstyle that causes the genuine smiles, it’s the “You’re Kenyan and boy are we glad to have you on board” that must be the key.
They look at me, not through me and they don’t give me those $2 pasty smiles you can buy at aisle number 3 of your favourite supermarket. The food on their international flights tastes good and is best washed down with the best tasting beer in the world, a Tusker that is served chilled and in copious amounts.
I must say, however, that the finger sandwiches served on domestic flights are best suited for passengers on the South Beach diet.
And if you’ve flown on any American carrier you know what I mean when I say it also helps that KQ air hostesses are easy on the eye and don’t look like they’ll challenge you into an unsolicited WWF wrestling match when the cabin lights are dimmed. Enough said.
So my Significant Other gets onto KQ 0886 to Bangkok early last week. The flight was scheduled to take off at 10.40pm.
Having boarded the flight later than expected at around 11:30pm, it turned out that the plane had a technical hitch which needed to be repaired.
Four hours later, with passengers already fed dinner on the plane, the hitch was repaired but the flight couldn’t take off because the crew would exceed the stipulated time on duty.
Of course, for many passengers, the question was: “What do you mean time on duty, the plane hasn’t even taken off.”
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) regulations, the more stringent KQ internal regulations and the Union have time restrictions of 12 hours for international flights and 10 for local flights, where duty is considered to begin from one hour before the flight is scheduled to take off to when it lands and debrief occurs. In view of the fact that the Bangkok flight time was about nine hours, sitting on the tarmac while waiting for the technicians to fix the plane for four hours seriously ate into the crew duty time.
The reason for the fastidiousness around duty time is largely due to fatigue. Unlike you who went home and blacked out from fatigue after your 16-hour day at work with your horrible boss, airline crew are lucky that their maximum work time is stringently regulated.
As the airline industry is fraught with high risks, safety standards rule supreme and a CEO of a national airline can be penalised if the crew duty time (particularly pilots) is exceeded.
It’s all about avoiding “Oh my God it’s not looking good” kind of statements from a sleep-deprived pilot behind the controls of a plane.
Back to the KQ 0886 saga. The passengers who deplaned at about 4am had to be given transport to the hastily scrambled hotel accommodation and for those who were transiting through Bangkok, connections have to be reconfigured.
One thing
Don’t forget that there were passengers in Bangkok who were waiting for the plane to arrive and turn around to Nairobi, that simultaneously had to be sorted out.
Add to that the logistics of getting a reserve crew to take the flight when it resumed its journey at 3pm later that day, which crew has to be made up of staff that are certified to operate that particular type of plane (cabin crew have to be certified too).
Significant Other was just happy to take off finally, but many others complained bitterly.
So the next time our national carrier inconveniences your travel, try balancing unplanned technical disruptions, crew schedules as well as passenger accommodation logistics and turn a profit at the same time.
I guarantee you one thing: it won’t be just the front of your trousers that takes the heat.
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