I enjoyed immensely this new aircraft Airbus 330-300 with its improved personalized entertainment system.
This is just great to be able to watch movies, documentaries, play games or listen to variety of music genres while flying - at ease, at the command of your fingertips. With bigger sizes and enhanced resolution of personal monitors, updated controllers and vast improvement with offered entertainment on the menu - flying couldn't be better!
So far, I used to read books passionately in-flight. This time, though I was equipped with this Medicins Sans Frontiers ex-president memoirs, I read only some 100 pages so far. I decided rather to catch up with my movies knowledge which has ben lagging behind quite badly for some time now...
It was totally new experience to be able to pick up my own movies and play them to my heart's content at times convenient to me! Fantastic! The only thing that is still remaining from that old era of in-flight entertainment 'Swiss made' are the poor quality headphones. The ear plugs hurt my ear lobes as they won't fit properly... they tend to fall off unless I force them inside to make them stay, and then they hurt a lot. The sound quality is poor and this is a big issue and a thing that I do not understand why... All the rest is great, yet the headphones that transfer all the goodies to your ears are way off the benchmark...May I ask the company bosses to provide us with headphones truly worthy of their motto - 'Swiss made'?
The main monitors on board kept us informed about the present position of the aircraft, its altitude and velocity, temps outside etc... I was impressed. Most of times numbers were playing around 850-900 kph and 12,000 meters above the sea level...
But, as they say in Tanzania, 'mkiani kuna sumu' (The poison is in the tail), it was exactly according to this saying at the end of our flight to Dar es Salaam. After roughed a bit touchdown on Dar runway, our pilot - either by his own mistake, or misled by the ground control - took a WRONG TURN into a taxiway that was blocked due to the ongoing expansion of the airport... After standing still for a while, with aircraft's tail sticking out onto the runway, the pilot came up on the intercom saying that the taxiway we took was blocked and we had to wait for a tractor to tow us back onto the runway and then via proper taxiway to the terminal that was some 200 meters away from us...
It took us around 45 minutes to get to the terminal. The average speed of this very last portion of our flight was about 5 kph! I guess we would be faster by foot, if allowed, reaching the terminal in 5 minutes, propelled by our own legs, than the dead engines of a mighty aircraft towed helplessly to its final parking position...
The pilot came to the door of the aircraft apologizing profusely for this incident. The ground staff of the airport did the same... But I guess, the real losers were the people waiting to board the plane at 21.00 hours, the time we finally got to the sleeve of the airport... I wonder what time, in fact, they were able to take off last night? And what happened to their further connecting flights in Zurich? How many tragedies, how many sudden changes in human lives, relationships, careers, families were caused by this one simple wrong turn?...
Wrong Turn - harmless as it may looked like yesterday, simply into a blocked taxiway - can have deadly consequences, just like in that horrifying movie...
No comments:
Post a Comment