The long queue outside is nowadays usual. But I was unperturbed. I had come in early and there were the Hajj passengers to photograph. The cat strolling through the airport was somewhat amusing. A man, who could have been Chinese, gave it some food. The cat knew his way around the place. I had found cat pooh on several occasions before, but now I had the source file!
Alarm bells should have rung when I found no notice of the flight on the electronic board. The lack of people at the Biman counter was a bigger case for alarm. My friend Porimol, a journalist from the Daily Star, who was also going to Kathmandu was in the queue. At least I was in the right place! It could have just been “Biman Time” I convinced myself. When no one had turned up by 10:00 am, we all went off to the Biman Sales counter. At least there was a Biman employee there. “We have had nothing official” they said, but hear that the flight might be cancelled. They had no arrangements for rerouting, or any other arrangement. Their excuse for not letting passengers know had some logic. Since they themselves hadn’t been told, what could they tell us?
Tag: airport
Forging Airline Tickets for Fun and Public Service
Dispatches from India – part 3
By Anu Garg
After a week in India attending a wedding, I was ready to head home to Seattle. As I approached the entrance to the Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, I had my passport and my travel cheat-sheet out. I knew you need a passport and a copy of your itinerary even to enter an airport in India. The security guard at the entrance inquired, “Passport and ticket?”
I handed him my passport and cheat-sheet on which I cram all my travel information (itinerary, frequent flier numbers, phone numbers, addresses, and other travel information), all on a single sheet. I may have to reduce margins, but I make sure that everything fits on no more than one sheet of paper.
The security man ignored the passport and pored through the flight info on the sheet and asked, “Where’s the passenger name on the ticket?” I told him that it had the flight info, but no need to add my name to the sheet as I already knew my name.
“Sir, I can’t let you in without your name on this.”
“But I have traveled in the past without any problem.”
“Sir, we have to follow the rules.” Apparently security had been tightened. Continue reading “Forging Airline Tickets for Fun and Public Service”
The New Leaf
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?Ah GMG? When to come when to go. Nobody know.? At least the guy had a sense of humour. I?d woken up at a ridiculous hour to get to the airport on time. The flight was scheduled at 6:45 am. Reporting at 4:45. Putting my battered arm in a sling, I had set off in pitch darkness. There were no counters marked GMG at the airport, but asking around they pointed me to row 4.
The monitors showed KU, the code for Kuwait Airways, but there were other passengers waiting for the same flight, so it looked as if I was in the right place despite the empty counter. I was heading to Chennai to train Indian photojournalists in a workshop arranged by the World Association of Newspapers WAN-IFRA. I hadn?t fully recovered from my recent accident, but since the participants were from all over India, and they had also advertised my lecture widely, it would have been awkward for them to change dates. Sadek, my physiotherapist had given me a big list of don?ts. There was no reference to standing at empty airline counters. The Haiku response by the airport official didn?t really help.
I did have a close connection and thought I would check. ?No general enquiry counter. Not inside the airport,? explained another airport staff. ?Try the GMG office on the 2nd floor.? The 2nd floor office was also closed. A hand written note in Bangla, gave the number of Mosaddek. A man answered, ?I know nothing about the flight, please try the ground staff. Office in other terminal next to the Gulf office on 4th floor.?
The journey continued. A young Indian man, also a passenger, joined me. The GMG office along the way was closed. ?There is one round the corner,? said a man in the corridor. ?That flight?s been closed for 4-5 months? said Mr. Anwar when we finally found a GMG office that was open. Both he and his colleagues were very helpful. ?We?ll endorse your ticket and make sure you get there,? they said. ?We don?t get passengers. There were a few flights during Durga Puja, but otherwise we don?t operate this route. Please get your ticket and we?ll arrange something.? So with my dud arm in sling and my young friend in tow, off I went.
Continue reading “The New Leaf”
Demagogues at Airports
He looked worried as most passengers would do, waiting for luggage that should have arrived. It had been a while since EK005 from Dubai had landed at Heathrow terminal 3. Belt 2 was almost empty. They announced that one lot of bags was yet to arrive. There was hope yet.
Now that we were the only two passengers left, we made eye contact. With a faint nod he registered my recognition, as celebrities often do. He asked me in Urdu, where I was from. Dhaka, I muttered, and we shook hands. He found no need to introduce himself as Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister of Pakistan. I resisted the temptation to ask him about his property in London, or the proposed tryst with Benazir.
This had occurred before, once at terminal 4 when General Ershad, the former president of Bangladesh had arrived. No fanfare, no waiting crowds, people walking by. I wondered how it felt. They both had absolute power when they ruled, and had used it with abandon. I remembered our resistance in the streets, the police brutality, the teargas. Noor Hossain and Milon’s death. Despite all the rhetoric about their closeness to the people, fending for themselves at the airport terminal was probably as near as they ever got to seeing what it was like on the other side.
7th June 2006
Biarritz
We Would Have Had So Much Fun Shooting Them Down
Paris, Charles De Gaulle airport, 13th October 2001.
The documents were impressive. I had an official letter from Le Directeur des Rencontres, Ministere de la Culture of Mali certifying that a visa was awaiting me in Bamako, a certificate of accreditation and an invitation letter from Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, a well-known personality in France and the director of AFAA/French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Still, I left well in time, knowing there might be problems. I was to do a report for the Prince Claus Foundation in the Netherlands and was on my way to attend the Fourth African
Photography Encounter in Bamako. I also had my yellow fever certificate.
None of what happened at the airport seemed sinister, until you realised what it was leading to. The immigration in Hall B in Terminal 2 at Charles de Gaulle is BEFORE the check-in desk. The questions started well before then. Where was I going, what did I have with me, why was I going. We went over and over the same things.
Lengthy manoeuvres that kept slowing me down. Still, there was almost an hour to go to departure time when I reached the check in desk, and immigration had already been done. I had a confirmed ticket, so I wasn’t worried. There were plenty of passengers at the check in desk, but when it came to me, the officer calmly said, “Sorry sir, the flight was closed at 10 o’ clock.” No degree of persuasion, or my insistence that I had arrived at the designated place in the airport well in time and that the delay was due to airport officials, seemed to matter. The fact that immigration, security and airlines check-in desks operate independently, made it easier for the check-in desk to deny responsibility. I had one of these cheap tickets, non- refundable, non-endorsable, so I was stuck.
Eventually, when I pointed out to the individuals who had delayed me, they did offer me an alternative booking for the outgoing flight. I could leave on a date FOLLOWING my date of return. No doubt they found it funny. I offered to pay to get onto another flight, but that too couldn’t apparently be done. By then I had worked out what was going on, and asked them to book me on the date they suggested, AFTER my due date of return. This they did. I could see people were still checking-in, and knew, if I could get through the blockade, I would get on the flight.
So I took a flight out to the nearest airport from which I could get a connecting flight. The idea being, that if I went through the check- in procedure elsewhere, where such barricades might not be present, they would no longer have grounds for refusing to let me fly. I left early in the morning from my hotel in Strasbourg, taking the tram and the bus through the fog at night to be the first person to arrive at the check-in desk. The woman at the desk at this small airport was extremely helpful. When I said I wanted to go to Bamako with a connecting flight, she immediately took my ticket and issued me a
luggage tag to Bamako. Then of course she discovered I was not booked on the flight. She made a tentative booking, issued me a `boarding pass’ without a seat number, and put in a note in the computer that I was a passenger bound for Bamako. She even gave my luggage (now tagged for Paris, in place of Bamako) a priority tag, so I would not lose time changing planes.
The luggage arrived early as planned. I rushed across to terminal B, arriving well in time to lay a claim to a seat. People were still checking in. When I approached the officer in charge, she whipped the temporary boarding pass from my hand, tore it to bits, and with a dramatic gesture, let the flimsy flight coupon fall to my hand. “The are no seats” was the terse reply.
This vulgar demonstration of power, reminded me of the article I had been reading on the 13th, the day I was first refused onto the plane, in the Wall Street Journal Europe (October 12-13, 2001, Brussels, page 3). [Lt. Ken, a 28 year old pilot from Washington state was munching on Twizzlers candy at the controls of his jet when the 57- millimeter artillery rounds started exploding below. “I’ve been peppered before, hunting pheasant, but it doesn’t really compare.” He said in Vinson’s ready room. Vinson’s air wing is trying to put all ts pilots through combat flights ? learning the tricks “before the other guys get smart,” as Capt. Wright puts it.
Capt. Wright saw two MIGs parked at the end of the runway. He fired a laser-guided bomb at one; the pilot of another F-14 nearby hit the second. “When they blew, they blew big ? you could see they were full of fuel and ammunition.” But infrared images indicated that the MIG engines were cold, which means that the jets weren’t about to take off ? much to Capt. Wright’s annoyance. “We would have had so much fun shooting them down” he said. As Capt. Wright flew back to the ship, chewing on a peanut-butter sandwich and sharing his post-battle emotions with the flight officer sitting behind, they suddenly had to dispense death to a different enemy: a cockroach had crawled up the airman’s legs. “We got a little bit of hilarity on that,” he said.]
John Wayne might have died, but these Texan-led soldiers could well have been riding into the prairie to `cut em off at the pass’. Five hundred years later, they continue to find new `Indians’ to `dispense death to’.
As for the luxuriant growth of hair on my face. I’ve decided to let it grow longer.
Shahidul Alam
Tue Oct 16, 2001