Chapter 30: A Special Assignment

“Good morning everybody,” I said as I said down for the team meeting on Monday morning after spending a full week on the line. “What’s the verdict, Fred?”

“Mostly positive,” he said. “One of the Jetstreams went technical and we had to bring in a replacement, that means customer compensation for twenty people. One day of Courchevel flights had to be diverted to Chambery due to bad weather and we bussed the passengers to Courchevel. Other than that we had no major problems.”

“Is that a normal amount of disruption?” I asked.

“Fairly good, actually,” he said. “Air Berlin sent a fax congratulating us on our first week performance. Diversions to Chambery or Geneva are normal and we have standing contracts with local bus companies. The weather up there is notoriously unpredictable. And only one technical is better than we could have expected. We had an 88% punctuality rate, which is not bad if you’re flying into Düsseldorf too.”

“Right, and what about the moolah?” I asked.

“I don’t think we can complain,” Fred replied, sorting the papers before him. “The Wilhelmshaven flights are the only ones that weren’t at least break-even. But that was to be expected, because we only announced them two weeks ago and nobody has ever flown scheduled services from there. It will take some time for folks to notice the new service.”

“So we had no major loss makers?” I asked for confirmation.

“Absolutely none,” Fred reported. “Some were just over break-even, so we’re talking a hundred quid a day or so. The Czech flights could definitely do better, but every single itinerary is in the black. The Volkswagen milk runs are practically printing money for us.”

“That sounds almost too good to be true,” I said. “So were are the problems?”

“We could improve our on-time rate once the ramp agents have more experience,” Fred said. “We’ve had a few incidents with luggage going into the wrong plane, especially at Düsseldorf, but I think those kinks will iron out once they’ve had a few weeks on the job. For the first week I would say it is no reason to be alarmed.”

“Jack, what about the ferry business?” I asked Fred’s brother.

“We’ll get the last Gulfstream on Wednesday,” he reported. “With a few breaks on and off the order books are full all the way to June. But I will need some additional budget.”

“What for?”

“We have a few orders for ferrying single-engined bird-whackers across the Atlantic. We need to order a few additional supplies – mobile oxygen supply, ferry tanks, survival kits. When Fred and I gave up our business, we sold off the whole kit and caboodle.”

“Bea is in charge of budgets, I’ll approve whatever purchase request you need to make,” I said. “Right, Fred, schedule yourself on the line for the week. I’ll take over ops until Sunday. We don’t want you to get rusty.”

Everybody chuckled, and Fred gave me a grateful grin.

Over that following week I got a good taste of just how hard Fred was working. The constantly arriving flight reports were driving me insane. That printer never stopped spewing out new pieces of paper. I fired off an email to Bernd that he better find and hire an office assistant for Fred in a bloody hurry.

I was slated to visit Esther in the next week, and I could feel I would be more than ready for a short vacation by then. What I read on those flight reports though made the stress a bit more bearable. Many Germans stretched their Christmas holidays all the way to Epiphany on January sixth, and in some federal states it was an actual state holiday, so on Friday, January seventh I could see that the first week and most of the second had been a mere preview of what was to come.

The passenger numbers spiked and quite a few flights had been completely sold out. The danger loomed that Air Berlin would demand bigger planes if we sold out itineraries on three consecutive days. For now we would be ‘saved by the bell’ due to the reduced travel on weekends, but in a roundabout way we were in danger of being too successful, and we only had two more Dash-7s to spare. Buying even more planes was not an option after the massive investments of 1999.

My worries dissipated a bit on the following Monday. With the first workday after Epiphany falling on a Friday, many people had probably just extended their vacation by a day and the massive spike had been caused by people rushing to get home.

From what I could gleam from the computer system, the passenger numbers were higher than during the first two weeks, but not high enough to put us in danger of running out of Dash-7s.