London Heathrow, Saturday, 1997-07-19 local (Z+1)
Hello, All,
Just wanting some notes for my own record, and thinking some may be interested.
I had the first 12 days of July off and then the rest of the month on home reserve. When I found out what I had, I wondered how I had wound up with that. I usually get somewhere between my 5th and 8th choices, and the line I got was way down on my bid list.
There's a requirement on home reserve that you have to be able to reach JFK within 12 hours, an obvious impossibility from Oregon. However, when I was hired, I was told that they made allowances for those of us living on the West Coast.
Crew scheduling called me last Saturday afternoon for an early Sunday morning trip. When I told them I could not make it, they informed me that I was in violation of the union contract.
Late last Monday night—early Tuesday morning at JFK—they tried to get ahold of me for a trip Wednesday afternoon, leaving messages on both our answering machines and even calling Sandlins. I got the message when I got home and again had to tell them I couldn't make it. At that point the chief of crew scheduling came on the line, and I explained the situation to him, telling him that if they were going to continue this, I would probably choose to simply resign. At that point he became very conciliatory and offered me a trip Wednesday afternoon, which I accepted.
Later Tuesday morning, Machtomi (Tower's owner) fired the crew scheduling chief.
I'm on the trip now. Wednesday afternoon we ferried from JFK to Detroit and then did a subservice for British Airways, replacing one of their 777s. The whole trip has been chaotic, late out of JFK, later out of Detroit due to them not being ready to fuel a 747 there.
The real mess came when we arrived here at Heathrow. We came in as a “Speedbird” flight—British Airways call sign—and that confused the hell out of British customs and immigration. We spent nearly two hours sitting on a bus trying to get to the hotel. Immigration and customs couldn't agree as to how we should be treated. The British bureaucracy is notoriously inflexible. We finally got to the Excelsior Hotel only to find that nobody had made reservations and they had no rooms. So, another two hours while that was straightened out, and we finally got rooms at the Heathrow Ramada, probably for about twice the price they would have cost at the Excelsior. There's 17 of us—3 cockpit crew and 14 flight attendants.
When we did get clearance to leave the airport, the driver tried to take us through a gate that wasn't the “proper” gate for departing non-BA crews. The guard refused to lift the bar, forcing the driver to go to the other side of the airport and use the proper gate. Incredible. Now I know how the Indians got their inefficient, inflexible system. Actually, it's well known that the Brits infected all their colonies with this type of bureaucracy.
However, in spite of all the trouble, this trip is better for me than either of the two things they had earlier tried to give me. They were “turns”—go to a place and then back in the same day, which would have meant staying at JFK at my expense, and getting rooms there now is difficult. The crew hotels are jammed.
Anyway, in a few hours we'll bus over to Gatwick, London's second airport in terms of size, and then Harare, Zimbabwe and on to Johannesburg, South Africa. At least that's the plan of the moment. It's another British Airways subservice.
Zimbabwe, by the way, is the old Rhodesia.
And Harare is the old Salisbury.
I've never overnighted in Africa, so it will be at least mildly interesting. After Joberg, we'll come back to Gatwick and later down again and overnight in Harare.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Bye, All...Terry
p.s. The weather here is typical English summer...lousy...cloudy, rainy, windy, cool