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Hong Kong, Furama Hotel, Saturday, 1997-11-22 17:30 local (Z+8)
Hello, All,
Well, I'm still sitting in Hong Kong. I have this beautiful view of Victoria Harbour out my hotel room window, but I'm getting tired of it. The reason I'm still here is that Tower's freighter had to have the #4 engine replaced when it got to New York. Hopefully, we'll get out of here tomorrow afternoon. The airplane is sitting on the ground in Anchorage at the moment, waiting out the noise curfews in Japan. It can't refuel in Khabarovsk because the Russians are out of fuel—again. All Japanese airports have a 23:00 to 06:00 noise curfew. The plan is to put it in the air so as to arrive at Chitose, on the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan, just after 06:00.
I wanted to tack on a few items I neglected to mention about the confusion of the trip here. It seems amazing how confusing items seem to gang up on us, but it really isn't. Random events are seldom uniformly distributed, and that leaves only the phenomenon of them bunching up.
Anyway, while on the ground at Khabarovsk, the captain asked me what the forecast weather was for Hong Kong. I told him cloudy and hazy but not really bad. Enroute he got to looking at the forecasts, and said something like, “I thought you said Hong Kong weather wasn't good. Hell, it's clear there.” I looked at him with raised eyebrows, and he handed me the forecast. The forecasts are listed by each airport's four-letter ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) code. He was looking at the forecast for UHHH—that's Khabarovsk, from which we had come. The code for Hong Kong is VHHH. He's a Texas good-old-boy; he doesn't check things too closely.
The Japanese do a lot of rerouting. At one point they cleared us direct to Miyakejima. That confused me because it was in back of us. Ah, but, no, it was Miyakojima that was in back of us. Mikyakejima was yet to come. They won't get me on that one again.
Hong Kong controllers are typically British and are usually very good. However, they screwed us up on the approach into here. The first approach controller took pains to make sure we would keep our speed up. U.S. pilots tend to want to slow to 250 knots below 10,000 feet because that's the rule in the U.S.—but nowhere else. Anyway, we kept it moving, maintaining 330 to 350 knots until we were really close in, and it was obviously going to cause some problems in the approach. I finally asked the current controller—we had by now been switched through a couple—if he still wanted us at high speed. He said he didn't care what speed we used. Somebody hadn't communicated, and it screwed up our turn to final. That final controller called the turn for us based on what he saw on his screen. When we slowed, as we finally had to, it then caused the angle of intercept he gave us to be insufficient to close with the localizer course. We finally just cheated—added 15 degrees to what he had given us.
So much for the confusion of getting here. I've been taking some long walks since there's no place here to conveniently run. It's a truly interesting place. One of the more amusing things is that in the toilets of these high priced shopping malls, the individual latrines and stalls have reserved signs on them. One might say, “Reserved for the patrons of....”, or, “Reserved for the staff of....”. I've never used them when there's been a crowd. I wonder if anyone pays attention to them.
Well, I feel a serious, 12 hour sleep coming on. <g>
Terry
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