St. Helena. too windy
Discussion
And the mail ship is now parked up in Portland. https://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/16992678.former-...
bloomen said:
https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2018/12/...
This was recently posted and it looks like all is deffo not well still.
There've been tales of epic flight delays due to low cloud and utterly useless handling of the problems by the airline. It seems quite a few never made it St Helena at all.
It's somewhere I was thinking of going but I don't want to be dicking around in Johannesburg. My dream scenario would be to combine it with a stop on Ascension, or at the least going from Windhoek, but both won't happen any time soon.
This seems a weird read to me this. This was recently posted and it looks like all is deffo not well still.
There've been tales of epic flight delays due to low cloud and utterly useless handling of the problems by the airline. It seems quite a few never made it St Helena at all.
It's somewhere I was thinking of going but I don't want to be dicking around in Johannesburg. My dream scenario would be to combine it with a stop on Ascension, or at the least going from Windhoek, but both won't happen any time soon.
One couple have a ‘fleet of 18 taxis’......... 18? For a total island population of 4500 people? That’s as near many as my local town that has a population of 22K. I have no idea what the cost of fuel is on the island, yet the average wage is £7K a year. That’s not much to be able to afford to catch a cab everywhere.
Another spent £3 million on hotel renovations expecting an influx of tourists, yet if the airport had worked as expected it was suggested that the max amount of tourists in a year would rise to only 29K, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have expected them all to stay at her place.
I do feel for the island though, what an utter cock up.
Edited by Wozy68 on Monday 31st December 11:52
Wozy68 said:
This seems a weird read to me this.
One couple have a ‘fleet of 18 taxis’......... 18? For a total island population of 4500 people? That’s as near many as my local town that has a population of 22K. I have no idea what the cost of fuel is on the island, yet the average wage is £7K a year. That’s not much to be able to afford to catch a cab everywhere.
Another spent £3 million on hotel renovations expecting an influx of tourists, yet if the airport had worked as expected it was suggested that the max amount of tourists in a year would rise to only 29K, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have expected them all to stay at her place.
I do feel for the island though, what an utter cock up.
They were coaxed into staking everything on tourists and the gist is that the people with the plan knew they wouldn't come but carried on without telling the locals. One couple have a ‘fleet of 18 taxis’......... 18? For a total island population of 4500 people? That’s as near many as my local town that has a population of 22K. I have no idea what the cost of fuel is on the island, yet the average wage is £7K a year. That’s not much to be able to afford to catch a cab everywhere.
Another spent £3 million on hotel renovations expecting an influx of tourists, yet if the airport had worked as expected it was suggested that the max amount of tourists in a year would rise to only 29K, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have expected them all to stay at her place.
I do feel for the island though, what an utter cock up.
Fuel's going to be horrific. The wages are incomprehensible. You see full time council jobs with salaries of £4500-6000 and I've seen mentions of butter being £6. I genuinely don't know how anyone survives there and it seems most have to work on Ascension or the Falklands to support people at home.
On the article linked above by Ashcroft in the comments someone even suggested they should have put the money into building a proper pier/harbour for visiting big cruise ships for their tourist injection (500-1000 per ship) instead of the runway extension. But to me that is just as stupid, I don't know of any cruises that would sail off away from any other landmass for a 1,200-1,800 miles 6 day detour (3 days there and 3 days back) to visit St Helena and looking at the coastline of St Helena the engineering involved could have been on a similar massive scale as the runway.
FourWheelDrift said:
On the article linked above by Ashcroft in the comments someone even suggested they should have put the money into building a proper pier/harbour for visiting big cruise ships for their tourist injection (500-1000 per ship) instead of the runway extension. But to me that is just as stupid, I don't know of any cruises that would sail off away from any other landmass for a 1,200-1,800 miles 6 day detour (3 days there and 3 days back) to visit St Helena and looking at the coastline of St Helena the engineering involved could have been on a similar massive scale as the runway.
Besides which the quay built by the airport contractor looks pretty solid, it's good enough for tenders to pull alongside or possibly smaller 'expedition' cruise liners could dock; it has a minimum depth of 5.5m and can take vessels up to about 100m long.Thread resurrection time.
I was bumbling around YouTube the other day and came across this rather good documentary on the airport - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-QejUTDCWw
There's also this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMiucylV0Rs - in cockpit view from an A318 that was chartered to take PPE and medical staff to the Island.
I was bumbling around YouTube the other day and came across this rather good documentary on the airport - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-QejUTDCWw
There's also this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMiucylV0Rs - in cockpit view from an A318 that was chartered to take PPE and medical staff to the Island.
UpBeats said:
Where and how do they get jeta1 from?
They can refuel at the airport on Saint Helena.They have to arrive with quite a lot of fuel in case they have to divert to Ascension Island (the video showed 11.4 tonnes on board on landing). Not sure if that would have been enough to get them safely back to Accra, but they did some training circuits which would have burnt some of that off.
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