Willem's Planet

I picked up a friend at Cape Town International Airport today, which is where I found this life-size bronze elephant.  The beast was created under the direction of Jean Doyle and the Doyle Art Foundry, with the help of a fellow sculptor.   The project took a full 2 years to complete.      Donations from the public can be put in the tree stump collections box for the Out of Africa Children’s fund.    The elephant is not a permanent fixture :  it will be auctioned at the end of the year and the funds raised will also go to charity.

That’s me, hitting a few balls against the wall on the tennis court at my brother’s house.    Tessa the Jack Russell terrier is trying to nab the ball.     The oak trees lining Victoria Avenue at the University of Stellenbosch campus (it’s my alma mater) have no leaves this time of year.    And the sidewalks will fill up with students on Monday when they return for class after their winter break.

We have beautiful calm and mild weather here in Stellenbosch.    This oak tree found itself in the wrong spot when the road was built a long time ago, but was left in place (kudos to the road builders).     Just be sure to pass it on the left !   We drive on the left side of the road, the same way the British do.

 

 

Cape Town International Airport was fogged in as we approached it at 9 am local time, but we landed nonetheless.   The pilot announced afterwards that the smooth landing was thanks to Boeing’s automatic landing system on the aircraft.       Of course, the pilot has to be certified and the airport’s ground systems have to support the whole process as well !  I think we did a Cat II  landing since the visibility was about 300m (1,500 ft).  The sequence of cockpit shots are from a video clip I found on-line.

Here is a rundown of the Instrument Landing System (ILS) Categories  :
Cat I :  200 feet Decision Height* (DH);  2,400 feet (or 1,800 ft) Runway Visual Range (RVR)
*The height at which point a decision must be made to either continue the approach or to execute a missed approach (abort the landing).
Cat II Restricted :  150 feet DH;  1,600 feet Runway Visual Range (RVR)
Cat II :  100 feet DH;  1,200 feet RVR
Cat III A :   No DH (alert height generally 50 feet);  700 feet RVR
Cat III B :  No DH (alert height generally 35 feet);   600 feet RVR
Cat III C :  No DH,  zero visibility – a “blind” landing.    This one is almost never done, since the pilot will not be able to find the gate after landing !

The first picture is of Lagos coming in from Frankfurt (6 hr flight).    In the next one we’re at the arrival gate.   Murtala Muhammed is a former military head of state that the airport is named after.     So .. how did it go in Lagos airport?  Well,  was quite an adventure!    The passport check point is as basic as it gets : 2 uniformed officials behind a bare counter top inspecting our passports and the blue arrival cards that we filled out.    NO passport scanner, NO camera, NO computer.   Not even a pad and a rubber stamp !   And where’s my visa?  the official asked.   My heart jumped – ‘Uh – I’m just connecting, on my way to South Africa’, I replied.    Ok, said the customs official, we will hold your passport.   Go and collect your luggage and come back here.      The two baggage claims are not marked, there is no air conditioning and it is crowded.   But lo and behold, my luggage did show up, and now I clamber back up the stairs man-handling my bags.    The person that took my passport is no longer at the desk – turned out it got handed over to a person in another room.    The guy with our passports tells 4 of us to follow him.    We go outside onto the tar road in front of the terminal, dodging the taxi drivers soliciting rides, then back into the terminal, up another flight of stairs.    By now I’m sweating the way I do after eating mildly spiced Mexican or Thai food (a lot!) .    Inside there is another crowd of people clamoring at the South African Airways check-in counter.  No problem : our escort yells at the officials in charge of the check-in line,  and gets us right in front.     Finally he hands our passports back to us and shows is to the security check point for the boarding gates.

So the ‘passport separation anxiety’ we felt was not warranted – the official was very helpful.   We would have been totally at a loss as to where to go next, after going through the passport check.   Should we have tipped him?  I don’t know – I didn’t.   I didn’t have any local currency anyway.   But if the airport had been modeled on Schiphol airport from what I read on-line, there was none of that efficiency visible.    The airport suffers from badly designed passenger traffic flow; it needs to install electronic systems, and it needs some serious sign posting to be installed as well.

The cool African mask is from inside the lounge at the airport.

Another 6 hrs got us in at 6.00 am at Johannesburg airport.   I had to hustle to make my 7.00 am connection to Cape Town (another long passport control line + re-check bagagge + run to the gate).    But hey, I made it, and so did my baggage : 3 international connections and 36 hrs of travel time!

I’m at Frankfurt airport.  They had us step off the plane onto a bus that took us to the terminal.   The Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper reported the upset of the German women’s soccer team against Japan in the Women’s World Cup .. quite a feat by the Japanese given that the German women’s team won the last two tournaments.

There is also an interview with writer Gary Shteyngart, about his new novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story ‘ – a darkly comic science-fiction story about the decline of the United States.    From the interview : The problem is that Obama can not act. He is very weak. He can do nothing against the opposition. The Republicans paralyze him, they are a very aggressive party.

 

Feeling frantic and flying on Korean Air?  Check into the Morning Calm section (it’s between Economy and Business, maybe it offers more legroom;  I’m not sure).     And the Seattle Times front page today reports that arriving passengers frequently face a bottleneck at the international arrivals point.    I have to say I have not experienced long waiting times the few times when I came in directly from Seoul, but I guess I have been lucky not to arrive at the same time as other international flights.

I am packing my bags for my trip to Cape Town, South Africa.   The itinerary breaks down as follows : 10 hrs on Lufthanza to Frankfurt, 6 hrs (Lufthanza) to Lagos, 6 hrs (South African Airways) to Johannesburg, 2 hrs (South African Airways) to Cape Town.   There were no seats left on the direct flight from Frankfurt to Cape Town and so the stop in Lagos, Nigeria (picture from the web) which is a first for me, is a little intimidating.   Even though the international terminal is modeled after Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, there were serious security problems at the airport until 2001.    For example, travelers arriving being harassed inside and outside the airport terminal by criminals, immigration officers requiring bribes before stamping passports and customs agents demanding payment for nonexistent fees.

I will travel to South Africa this Monday to visit my family.  I will travel on ‘Continental Airlines’ : really a combination of Lufthanza and South African Airways codeshare flights.   I read the report about the efforts to complete the merger of Continental Airlines and United Airlines in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek with interest (picture from this week’s issue).   In a way it’s the work that I do on some of my projects : phase some systems out and implement new ones in their place.    To create the world’s largest airline, the two carriers have to merge about 1,400 separate systems, programs and protocols.    In the end United Continental will provide service to 373 airports in 63 countries.  Its frequent flyer program will have more members than France has citizens (62 million).