May 17, 2010
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A ‘B’ Saturday
It was such a day on Saturday…….
In the morning got a call from the office to noperate the afternoon flight back to HKG…how nice, that means it will be an extra trip for this month…..
Rushed to the office to attend the preflight briefing…..everything seems normal except the Inflight Manager mention she would like to test us later for how well we will perform a secuirty check once borad the aircraft…..hm…interesting….is this for fun or serious? Anyway…. briefed my junior crew to perform all kinds of checks thoroughly….
At the gate….wow….. why so many Vancouver airport authorities and the Royal Mounted Police, Custom Officer, gathered around…..hm…..something not normal even the cockpit crew couldn’t board the aircraft. The ground staff told us that the aircraft would have a thorough Security Search and wil lbe towed away from the passenger terminal, at the waiting area, all pax, crew, staff memeber needed to move at least 250 feet away from the original boarding gate….ok being in the business for so long we knew what is happening…a Bomb Threat but we could not release and say anything cos the authority did not confirm anything about it. And since the whole situation was taken over by the local authorities we all could only follow their instruction
We then went to have lucnh at the airport restaurant and wait at another area for further information, while we wre waiting, we got online and with the power of FaceBook , informaiton been released…the airport received totally 3 Bomb Threat phone calls from a local mall pay phone, the first one claiming a bomb on board the incoming aircraft, the 2nd claiming the bomb is at the airport area, the 3rd one claiming that the bomb will be on the outing going flight…therefore the authorities took a serious measure and snet 2 Flighters to escort the incoming aircraft to land….following are the pic taken by my co-worker who was traveling on that flight back home..
Luckily the aircraft landed safely, and all incoming pax had to go to security search too…..
after nearly 5 hours on ground delay the authority annouced the incident was a Hoax and we were clear to board the flight and operate back to HKG
By the time I got into my hotel room…..I just realised I was awake over 24 hours….
Comments (3)
I was thinking about you when I read the news! Glad you are safe. It must be scary for your friend to see a fighter jet next to the aircraft. Hope they catch the person who call in the hoax. Be safe, enjoy HK,
What a mess! Glad it wasn’t real, of course, but made for a long and frustrating day, I’m sure. Does CX only operate the 747 into YVR or do you get the 777, too?
@stevew918 - tks… frankly I was pretty sure thing would have been ok, however the incident just touched everyone’s nerve.
@christao408 - I’ve heard a rumour that the Princess of Thai is supposed to travel from YVR to HKG with us on Sun, don’t know if the incident would have deferred or changed her her travel plan….? we do operate all 3 types of long hual aircrafts to YVR, B744,A343, and the B777ER