Athens to Sydney
On Sunday 30th May 2004 I made my way
to Heathrow for my flight to Athens The flight was overbooked but I made sure I
got on. It was a quick 3 hours and 6 minutes arriving in the evening, my Hotel
was a short walk from the terminal and that was that for the day. The next
morning I had final meetings with the airport and our agents and early in the
Afternoon the aircraft I was to spend most of the next few weeks on arrived.
The airline had arranged for me to have a crew ID card which meant that I was
able to come and go on the airport as I needed without the need for complicated
temporary airport ID’s. We were scheduled to leave Athens for Australia at
03:00 local time on Tuesday 1st June.
There are a lot of myths about
the Olympic Flame, It is true that the flame is lit from the rays of the sun
but not many people realise that it is split into daughter flames, in the case
of the Athens one it was split into six flames with three travelling on each
aircraft. Special permission is required to transport a flame on an aircraft
for obvious reasons; in this case the permission required us to have the flames
mounted on a bulkhead with a member of the crew with a fire extinguisher sat in
the seat next to the flames just in case. The International Olympic committee
required a member of their team to be sat next to the flames to make sure they
did not go out because of changes to the pressure and the amount of oxygen in
the atmosphere. The paperwork was also complicated and interesting. Every piece
of dangerous goods that has to travel on an aircraft is placed in one of nine
categories category 1 being Explosives and Category 9 being miscellaneous. The
flame has to be powered and in this case it was with oil which is a flammable
liquid (category 3) the flame however had to be (category 9) because the oil
would have been burnt in order to create the flame and therefore would no
longer exist. The departure was low key as the primary aircraft which was
following a couple of days behind us was to have all the media attention. The first of many operational “problems”
cropped up during the low key departure when the passengers turned up with the
flames at 02:00, how to get them through security. Obviously it was not
practical to put them through an X-ray so after some discussion a manual search
of the lanterns was made. And we departed on time. The first leg was seven and
a half hours to Colombo in Sri Lanka. Once again we were looking for a low key
transit and no one knew we had the flames on board but the exemptions for
carrying the flame required us to remove them from the aircraft whilst it was
being refuelled. We started to attract some attention from the airport workers.
After about 90 minutes we were on our way again and after nine and a quarter
hours we landed in Sydney on the morning of the 2nd June and for the
first time ever I found myself in Australia. With the passengers away we
cleared customs and sorted out a number of tasks on the aircraft before
shutting it down, it was then off for a final briefing on with our ground
agents for the arrival of the flame it was off to a local cargo warehouse where
we spent the next five hours sorting and loading the cargo before finally going
to the Hotel at about 6PM.
After a quick shower it was out for a meal with the
crew. Exhausted after the best part of 48 hours without seeing a bed I slept
like a baby. The next morning I had decided to take advantage of the few hours
I had before the midday pick up for the airport and took the Manley ferry which
allowed a trip round the harbour past the opera house and Bridge.
Time was so
short that having arrived in Manley it was onto the same ferry back to the
hotel. It was then off out to the airport to finalize the arrangements for the
flame arriving the following day and to load the backup aircraft. Whilst I was
at the airport I received a text message on my phone saying that I was
approaching my credit limit, this was a worry as my phone did not have a credit
limit. A quick call back to the office and an investigation with vodaphone
revealed that they have to set a credit limit even for none limited phones and
I was approaching the £1000 limit for my phone.... and it was only four days
into the month! I also took the opportunity to load my own suitcase onto the
aircraft as it had been arranged that we would keep our main bags on board and
just carry hand baggage with us changing the contents over as we needed. At 4PM
with everything complete and it was back to the hotel where messages were
beginning to come through about a problem with the decals on the aircraft, when
the primary aircraft arrived in Colombo some of them were beginning to peel
off. I got my relay ID issued bought a few souvenirs from the hotel shop and
then at 7PM it was back to the airport for an 11PM flight to Tokyo.
No comments:
Post a Comment