FlyerTalk Forums - Cyclone NIDA

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Quote:

Originally Posted by QRC3288 (Post 27006358)

taxi insurance is invalid

The SCMP claimed in an article yesterday (referencing this earlier article) that this is a myth invented by taxi drivers to gouge you illegally for more money.

(Completely off-topic fact of the day - I just noticed that scmp.com sits on servers in Canada, not Hong Kong!)

Quote:

Originally Posted by christep (Post 27006552)

....(Completely off-topic fact of the day - I just noticed that scmp.com sits on servers in Canada, not Hong Kong!)

Hmmmm, the Great White North...cheaper or cooler :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by christep (Post 27006552)

The SCMP claimed in an article yesterday (referencing this earlier article) that this is a myth invented by taxi drivers to gouge you illegally for more money

Hm, that one I hadn't heard before. Always made sense to me it that coverage would be limited

Quote:

Originally Posted by christep (Post 27006552)

deleted

Quote:

Originally Posted by gpia (Post 27006586)

Hm, that one I hadn't heard before. Always made sense to me it that coverage would be limited

Legco looked at this back in 2012 and found zero evidence for this. The reason Taxi fares go up is that everyone is trying to get home at once and the Taxi drivers are capitalists.

I can understand Taxi drivers not wanting to drive around in a T8. If one of those Neon signs comes down on your car....

The crew can go to work during T8, or at least some of them. MTR doesn't stop running, for one thing. So can ground staff. What CX doesn't want is endless overtime pay if things go worse.

OTOH, even if crew and ground crew can go to work, don't forget about those having the risk of being 'exposed' to the weather directly, such as caterers, ramp staff, flight crews doing on ground checks etc...if these can't happen then planes will still get stuck on the ground.

Quote:

Originally Posted by QRC3288 (Post 27000746)

None of CX's flights went out after around 8pm last night. Yet all the other carriers were successfully running departure ops until midnight. Most of the competitor flights to Europe (LX, LH, AF, VS, AY) all went out up until around midnight. I know a lot of those other carriers simply got "lucky" - aka, they had equipment sitting in HKG, and they may as well run it on the return if weather permitted - but still. Weather did permit it waaaay past the T8 signal got raised and CX probably could've operated 70% of the flights they cancelled.

Take SQ2, for example. HKG-SFO. Departed 11:30pm on time last night, took off at 11:55pm, and will arrive on-time in SFO in a few hours. Meanwhile, CX's equivalent flight - CX872 HKG-SFO, scheduled to depart at 12:30am - was cancelled, as is the return CX873. Same with CX880 (11:55pm departure), cancelled same with return. This was the dynamic with virtually every late-night CX flight last night.

I don't know all the thinking that goes into this, and perhaps there are other regulatory / etc considerations as well (legal / insurance situations once T8 goes up?), but it still seems like the abundance of caution was exercised and it didn't materialize neither as bad nor as early as anticipated.

I was supposed to be on a Manila flight at 9am that was cancelled. Because I live on a boat in HK I planned to stay overnight at the airport prior to the flight - so I was there that evening. We ate dinner in T2 and walked back to the hotel around the outside.... not a breath or wind or a drop of rain and that was around 9pm! The weather was much more hairy when we woke up around 8am but generally the night was pretty quiet until quite late. So yes, my assessment was that much of this was utterly over-kills. My experience (as a Diamond Cathay member) was pretty atrocious. No notification of the cancellation. No automatic rebooking on the next flight - my travel agent had to sit in a phone queue for about an hour to get it sorted. I ended up on the 2nd flight out which was delayed by 2 hours due to the typhoon and another hour with a technical fault! Even coming back from Manila yesterday night - another 3 hour delay. I didn't think much of their handling of what, when I lived in Wellington, would have been just a windy day!

For this case, we should keep in mind that the intensity of the typhoon was over-estimated. Part of the (rather huge) eye-wall reached parts of the territory yet force 12 winds were not recorded at any time, so the system probably didn't even deserve its typhoon status at that time (and would have been classed as a severe tropical storm instead).

The airport forecast also stated winds and gusts coming more or less perpendicular to the runways from the early evening, although those brave/silly enough to come in around that time would have found the actual winds to be nowhere near to what was forecast.

IMO, I'd want an airline to err on the side of safety. There was no way of knowing how bad things would get, with Nida aiming directly at HK. I had to spend an extra night in HK, but wouldn't blame CX for a minute. For ridiculous response to "weather," come to Portland or Seattle on a day with 1in (2.5cm) of snow.