Trying to exit Algiers Airport

Visiting Algiers on Business for 48 hours has more blogging experiences that I can type up - however please be warned getting a flight out of the Algeria is a time consuming and repetitive process - Your sequence will be something like this:

1. Arrival at airport - Vehicle Check by Military
2. Entering departure terminal : X-ray baggage and personal search
3. Check in
   Stamp of boarding pass by government rep who checks boarding pass versus passport at your airline check in desk.
4. Formal Passport check - you have to fill exit form and then go through Passport control.
5. X ray baggage and personal search + check of boarding pass
6. Customs check give back declaration on Currency (a form you filled out on entry) + another boarding pass & passport check
7. Boarding gate - you will notice the Gate staff give you back your boarding pass stub - this you give to another policeman directly behind the boarding gate, who checks your boarding pass and passport again.
8. On the air bridge to aircraft - all hand baggage is manually opened and checked.
9. then final body search

You get on the aircraft a relieved person !
I know it is better safe than sorry, but the process is fairly stressful and makes the US entry exit process look like a "walk in the park"……….

Excess baggage

Whilst waiting to check in for my Turkish Airlines I watch the Check-in queues for an Kenyan Airways flight to Nairobi.
The amount of luggage, boxes and containers per family was frightening. I see no chance of the plane taking off whatsoever - it will be too heavy !
Box after Box disappeared down the belts, and having checked in, everyone trooped to the excess luggage desk to pay their due. I hope Kenyan Airways are not as expensive as Emirates - who charged me 300 pounds for an extra 15 kg, when I moved out to work in Sharjah

Impact of flight cancellations

It's funny living and working away from Europe. Tonight both Air France and Alitalia have cancelled their respective flights to Paris and Rome. It caused mayhem here, amongst the normal chaos that is Dubai airport. Lots of very stressed Europeans trying to find a way home. It's Friday, you're due home for the weekened for an important family appointment......been there done that. I guess if I had been in Europe, there would have been plenty of news footage but out here there has been zero coverage.
I knew about these cancelllations many hours ago as I was due to travel on the Air France flight, but my company's agent was informed yesterday 7am CET i.e. nearly 48 hours ago that the flight was cancelled. I was then going to travel via Rome with Alitalia, but that was cancelled , so my route to Algiers is via Istanbul and Turkish Airines. I will blog later on my experience & my first leg is full of Frenchman, who I guess will seek out a connection onwards to Paris from Istanbul............

A summer horribilis for British Holidaymakers

It's been an awful summer for Brits jumping on flights both short and long haul. There has been plenty of bankruptcies, (probably EXCEL wins the award for the most horrible in terms of stranding holiday makers); and there have been plenty of safety incidents (e.g. cabin depressurisation on Ryan Air)
This incident today probably sums up the summer as a whole (Air Europa were rumoured to be one of those "local spanish airlines" with alledged financial problems as well) -

Gone 2 Sharjah

Well jumped on an Emirates flight from Manchester on Tuesday lunchtime to start a new job in Sharjah. It was a good job it was half empty as the service was pretty lousy. It seemed that one of the senior staff members was running a staff training session in the kitchen - the airline has obviously expanded so quickly, they're struggling to keep up on the staff training front.
Dubai airport was its usual chaos. The new Emirates terminal is meant to open on Monday, so perhaps some of the stress will come out of the existing terminal. It seemed a miracle that any of got our bags - they were running 3 planes's baggage per carousel, which given each plane was 777/340 size - baggage continually stacking up on the belt making it difficult to retrieve it , even for fairly tall people like me.

any way you find out how I am doing on my new blog

100 up but that is it !

So that is 100 flights this year, but with a new job starting in a few weeks I don't think I will cross 120 by year end.
New job, New country, New (well second) Blog.............

Caught in the ATC delays

Being on the 1650 FlyBE flight Southampton-> Nice I was right in the eye of the storm. It did seem chaotic in terms of the information from NATS to the airport. In the space of 30 mins, our slot (time when the aircraft is allowed to take off) went from Indefinite Delay to 2050 then 2350 to 1755. The last change was amusingly heard over every Aviance Ground staff radio as "oh SH#t they bought forward the Nice to 1755 - get those OAPs moving" - before the flights was more formally announced on the Airport tannoy in the correct way.
To be fair to the Aviance/FlyBE staff they did manage to cajole the 100 so passengers (mainly OAPS) very fast onto the Embraer 195; only for the Captain to explain that although we had a slot, we could not fly because our flight was outside UK airspace ......mmh .....obviously NATS needs some geography lessons. We finally left Southampton 2 hours and 35 minutes late.

XL - Still confusion and cost

Angry piece in the Times today from Stephen Pollard:

According to reports at the weekend, taxpayers - you and me, in other words - will be stiffed to the tune of £20 million to pay for the flights home of some people caught out by the collapse of XL. The Civil Aviation Authority runs a compensation scheme to take care of stranded holidaymakers and to refund forthcoming holidays that won't take place. But the scheme is already £21 million in deficit. So guess who is going to pick up the tab? You and me.

I did not see the weekend comments however:

• Why is the CAA fund in deficit ?
• Does it really cover forthcoming flights ?
• Where does the various ATOL /IATA/Holiday insurance /bond/schemes overlap this one?

As I have said on previous posts, someone need to straighten this out to end the confusion etc. especially as further airlines will inevitably fail.

1650 and it's almost over

As anyone noticed that the demise of Alitalia is dragging on much in the same way as Gordon Brown's premiership( whoops..... slipped into politics there ....not the plan for this blog.- Ed).
I guess politics are involved with Silvio's promise to bring the Calvary, but my experience of Italian entrepreneurs (perhaps distinguishing them from other parts of Italian commercial community) is that they are smart investors. Despite the distraught loss of jobs, you wish someone would end it .......if only to see what would rise from ashes - maybe a new airline with new jobs or just another slightly more efficient Alitalia ( with some jobs) as we saw in Brussels with Brussels Airlines following on from Sabena.

XL - Was it really the oil price ?

The XL story may not be as straight-forward as it seems - Radio 5Live have been running stories that in the last 2 months employees were phoning around Customers witrh bookings asking them to take further services for cash e.g. priority boarding and check-in, so XL management knew cash was dwindling.
Now it appears Financial Markets knew and people were betting on a bankruptcy outcome. If the Icelandic stock exchange forced a statement out of XL's Loan Guarantors, why couldn't some sort of action be taken here in the UK ?