Cloud

Another set of flights moved across to terminal 5 this week, the biggest move since the first day. All went smoothly. The same cannot be said for the financial markets last week. ‘A week is a long time in politics’, they say. Nowadays a week is a long time, period.

Green

We switched a further 15 longhaul flights to T5 today – the first since the less than successful opening day. The media were on hand to write the “more chaos at T5 story” but left disappointed. It was a fabulous day for the airline and more importantly for our customers. The terminal and our operation worked pretty much flawlessly. One of the best days I can remember. I couldn’t resist snapping a photo in our operations centre today. Delayed flights show in red, early or on-time flights in green. Fantastic.

T5 departure concourse

Day three and things are going a little better with T5, but still extremely ‘fragile’. Here is a photo I took on the first morning, before any problems emerged. It is still such a wonderful terminal, I just hope the systems start working more reliably soon.

T5

Well, only a few hours to go before T5 is finally open for business. The first flight scheduled to arrive in T5 left Hong Kong 4 minutes early, so we’re off to a good start. I’m away to bed, since I need to get up at 3:15am (!) tomorrow. An exciting day ahead.