8 November. Our black day in Kolkata

November 9, 2017

08:50 we arrived at the airport

10:00 customs

11:10 in a/c making the INDS updates for Far East. No success since INDS had failed to deliver us the correct software in spite of daily talks to them in USA for at least one week.

11:40 we left the a/c and we tried to contact INDS (local time 9pm), Jeppesen (lt 6am), Pilatus and Honeywell (lt 10pm), but a combination of noise made by the bus, absence of WIF and time differences in the world, made that impossible.

12:25 we changed our working area to the at least air-conditioned entrance of the hall, but the WIFI connection was very bad in that entrance.

12:50 we changed with silent consent of a custom officer to the hall itself, but we started to run out of battery capacity, except for the Sony mobile battery charger, my birthday present of Mariana, Malta.

14:30 once we realized and accepted we would never achieve anything without a properly working WIFI, in combination with fully charged iPhones and iPads, we decided to try to leave the airport and continue our work from the hotel. Our hotel appeared to be fully booked. We changed to the Terminal.

15:40 We reported our intentions to our handling agent who informed us that we were not allowed to go back to the a/c. The a/c was not in order to be left like that so with utmost force upon the customs they agreed that our luggage could be taken off, but we were not allowed to join not even to put all the covers on the AOA, Pitot or on the exhaust tubes.

17:00 our handling agent came back with all emergency equipment, but not with any of our luggage.

18:20 A second round with the customs resulted in one extra permission that luggage could be off-loaded, but again without us. It was becoming dark already. During that operation our people were interrupted in their work to take off our luggage by other officials on the airport.

19:30 our agent came back with only one piece of the luggage of Sophie! The Taj Hotel, at a distance of one hour driving from the airport, had rooms for us but the Uber organisation was not able to provide us with a car within 60 minutes so we told we would take another taxi, who delivered us at around 9pm at the hotel with all our emergency equipment plus Sophie’s luggage!

21:45 dinner in the hotel

Urs wearing Sophie’s scarf to stay warm in the ice cold restaurant

We have stayed more than 11 hours at the airport of Kolkata with impossible custom officers, not givings the slightest cooperation. Five years ago Pilatypus got damage by a stupid parking instruction of the port authorities, so we have placed this airport now firmly on our black list.

Black day, resulting in black list, but let us not forget that INDS is to blame for all this. Negligence, ignorance, uninterested, who can say it?

Finally I received at around 22:00 a new upload from INDS which included the Far East. This was the first moment we had hope again being able to depart the next day to Mandalay in Myanmar. I am sure that we would still be in Kolkata, if it were not without the extremely good support of Sandra Zapata/Honeywell.