“This will end when we stop being good at it”

An insightful quote from one of the officers at post. She made this observation as we were preparing for our fourth and probably final charter flight out of Dhaka. In some strange way, we have been victims of our own success.

We did a good job of filling the planes the first three times around (we set the world-wide record for percentage of seats filled on our flights). I guess the Department figured that we were efficient enough to justify a fourth flight.

We were successful in evacuating over 900 people over our first three flights. And the demand for additional flights continued. The Ambassador decided that we would continue. As long as there were Americans who wanted out, and as long as the State Department would subsidize the flights, we would try to get Americans back to America.

Of course, while we have been evacuating Americans, the pandemic situation in Bangladesh has been intensifying. This is the most densely-populated country in the world, and the local healthcare infrastructure is woefully unprepared to treat an outbreak. We were ordered to wear PPE at the airport.

We had spent several days building out flight manifest, negotiating with the charter airline, which we jokingly named “Ominous Air.” We thought that was funny at the time. Later on, we discovered the meaning of the word “irony.”

The day started out normally enough. A huge crowd of people showed up at the airport, with way too much luggage. We did our check-in process. We even managed to fill the plane, this time to 100% capacity.

That’s when things went off the rails.

Ominous Air informed us that we had to off-board 16 people because of a problem with the emergency exit doors. We re-did the passeger manifest, keeping vulnerable people (elderly, health problems, etc) on the plane. People were paged and told that the couldn’t travel. Then the off-board number grew to 36. Then it went down to 28. In the end, we had to de-plane 27 people. We did all of the work, from the passenger manifest to contacting the passengers. Ominous Air contracted with a local ground support team that was supposed to do that. Then why did we do it? Good question. We’re still asking ourselves that.

Then we had to get the luggage from these 27 unlucky people off the plane. Ominous Air didn’t have a computerized luggage tracking system, and the ground service company didn’t seem to want to look at luggage tags and identify suitcases. We we did it. Why? Excellent question. Two of my coworkers and I crawled into the guts of the plane to look for the luggage.

The plane finally took off seven hours late. Many passengers were grumpy (to put it mildly). The emails and phone calls from family members poured in overnight, asking for landing times, wanting information about the status of the flight. This is a real public-relations mess. Our credibility has taken a serious hit.

I guess we aren’t good at this anymore. So maybe it will end now?