iPassions

Well… it was certainly better than yesterday! Don’t know why, into the mid day, Bob passed by the office saying, ‘ forget about yesterday, leave everything behind and be happy & smile for today…” I have no idea, why he said all that as I guess he had no clue what was going in my mind about yesterday anyway!

I think, together with both Glen & Shanaka – my wonderful colleagues, we came up with a ‘plan’ in an effort to do something about suddenly cropped up meal trolley problem Well., guys, I guess we will have to put ‘the plan’ into action fast ! OK, now the bit, I have to do my self…. I got an appointment slot with Kev for tomorrow to go see him to make a rather strange request…. again something to do with meal trolleys. Then I also sent a couple of emails to a couple of senior industry colleagues at Flight Kitchens we cater asking for their personal attention to look into any excess meal trolleys lying around in their respective Kitchens. Let’s see how all these will go….

Just about less than an hour to take off of the Johansberg flight I had a call from Kev and he started saying, ‘mission impossible..’ he wanted me to fix 2 CHMLs for a couple of kids accompanying parents on the flight as they were not pre-booked due to tickets were purchased late to rush for an family emergency. Well, I had to get on with his request to ‘make it happen’ – made a couple of quick phone calls to the Chefs @ the Kitchen and Ops guys, including Darrell who was on the ramp and we managed to deliver 2 CHMLs to the aircraft without any delays and ‘the Mission was succeeded’

I didn’t write about this in my post yesterday; because I was really p….d off with my friend(s) @ IT. Those who know me and really know me, know how much love and passion I have for this IT stuff is (ofcourse among other things!) But when I don’t see same kind of interest from them in getting on with the stuff we had discussed and planned, not keeping up to schedules, and stuff like that,I can’t stand for that ; so I was not at all a happy person with IT y’day and had avoided any communication with ‘em since last evening. However, I feel good that I picked the phone this afternoon and talked to them and explain how could we do things even better with much understanding and clarifying any doubts and that was brilliant

The new Flight Kitchen dedicated just for Emirates is now in full operation here in Dubai and has been since last week. Its a monster kitchen and supposedly the world’s largest Flight Kitchen built to capacity of 115,000 meals a day! The migration of Emirates operations from the old kitchen to the new kitchen was a mammoth task, although it was carried out in about 8 phase approach. Kudos to all those involved ! Like everything else, understandably , it would take at least a couple of months to get all operations smoothen up in the new kitchen and I guess, we may have to bear up with on and off minor hiccups and try & support them in any way we possibly can.

This afternoon we had our weekly meeting with EKFC in the Conference Room @ the new kitchen (EKFC1) and overall, the meeting went well. It seems, we have a shortage of meal trolleys to meet flight packing requirements and really cannot understand where the hell these meal trolleys are disappearing ? Some times in the recent past, we’ve been carrying out trolley counts both out and in and was stoppe, when everything seem going on well. I guess, absence of real time trolley count @ different locations around the world and/or lack or no visibility at all of building up of trolleys have made managing the meal trolleys even more challenging ! Bob mentioned the idea of ‘SALIK’ tags for trolleys; however, there appear some obstacles quoting ‘high costs’ to it. It is however, suprising that we are not making concentrated efforts pursue SALIK tags (RFID) methodology, when other areas such as Cargo has already introduced RFID tags to track ULDs and even Airport Services are cosnidering biometrics technology to further improve customer service !