September Roster

Here I am back again with another roster post. Slowly but surely they are starting to get a little more interesting, with more than a couple of flights per month. I can’t wait for things to go back to how they were pre-covid (my salary is crying out for 100 flying hours!) but for now I’m happy to have some layovers, especially some where we can go out and explore again.

If you saw my roster post last month, I only ended up doing 2 of the original flights I was rostered. The Cape Town flight I had was cancelled fairly shortly after the roster was published, and then I was also removed from the Dammam and Kabul flights. Glasgow was also removed because my Tunis layover turned into a 48 hour layover!

Instead I got given a Perth flight which I was happy with, as it meant a good amount of flying hours. It was a shame we were trapped inside the hotel room for the duration of the stay, but unfortunately that’s the requirement from the Australian government. 

At the end of the month I was also put on a Düsseldorf flight which was a nice and easy trip, and a good way to bring in September. This month (if nothing changes!) I’ll be heading off to:

  • TUN – Tunis, Tunisia
  • SEZ – Mahé Island, Seychelles
  • CKY-DSS – Conakry, Giunea & Dakar, Senegal
  • MAA – Chennai, India (turnaround)
  • DUS – Düsseldorf, Germany

As you can see, some repeats from August!

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May Roster & An Update

Well hello there – and welcome back to my blog! It’s certainly been a while since I’ve updated anything on here, and this will be my first post of 2021, oops! I never meant to go so quiet, but as you can imagine, I’ve not been flying very much. Slowly things are starting to pick up and I’m seeing more and more flights on my roster, but since we are still not allowed to leave the hotel on our layovers, I don’t have a whole lot to update you on!

Flights are gradually getting back to normal, although we still have to wear our full PPE (mask, gloves, gown and visor) and of course passengers still have to wear a mask. More destinations are opening up though which is a great sign, and I’m hopefully that eventually things will get back to normal. Let me tell you, I’ll never spend another layover in my hotel room again!

Believe it or not, this month I have an *almost* normal roster – quite a few flying hours, which makes for a nice change. Especially since we get paid depending on how much we fly; it’s been over a year since a normal salary.

So if everything goes to plan and no flights get removed (fingers crossed!) in May I’ll be heading to:

  • JFK – New York, USA
  • AMM – Amman, Jordan (turnaround)
  • HAM – Hamburg, Germany
  • BP – Business Promotion Event
  • DMM – Dammam, Saudi Arabia (turnaround)
  • LUN-HRE – Lusaka, Zambia – Harare, Zimbabwe
  • IKA – Tehran, Iran

I was actually quite excited when I got my roster, as whilst I have been flying a fair amount the past few months, this is the busiest roster I’ve seen since the pandemic!

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November Roster & An Update

Hello from Dubai!

As you may have noticed, it’s been pretty quiet over here on The Dubai Diaries. I’m sure I don’t need to mention why, but as you can imagine the aviation industry has been impacted hugely by the COVID-19 pandemic.

I am very fortunate to still have a job, unlike many of my friends and colleagues who have sadly been made redundant. However, in comparison to my usual busy rosters, I’ve hardly been flying since March, although slowly things are starting to pick back up a little. That’s not to say more redundancies won’t happen; at this point it seems nobody knows when the airline industry will recover. I can only keep my fingers crossed that I am one of the lucky ones who gets to keep this job that I love so much.

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April Roster – Cancelled?!

So I originally wrote this post around a week or so ago… in the meantime Emirates has announced that all flights are suspended, the UAE government has shut down the airports, and we will be taking a salary cut for the next 3 months minimum. These are certainly crazy and unprecedented times, and I feel lucky to still have a job.

I know of so many airlines that have paused or ceased operations completely, and with most of the world on lockdown the travel industry has certainly taken a big hit.

When I wrote this I still had all my flights on the roster, but day by day they disappeared and I was left with “available days”. As of March right now half of these destinations are ones that we’ve temporarily stopped flying to. I’m certain this will take longer than we all think, but we can be hopeful that perhaps there will be some flights rescheduled at some point in April.

So this is what my roster looked like when I got it a couple of weeks ago…. as of now I have none of those flights left!

  • BRU – Brussels, Belgium
  • WAW – Warsaw, Poland 
  • RUH – Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (turnaround)
  • MUC – Munich, Germany
  • DAC – Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • BAH – Bahrain, Bahrain (turnaround)
  • BOM – Bombay, India (turnaround)
  • ATH – EWR – Athens, Greece & Newark, USA

I was actually quite looking forward to some of these trips – in particular the Athens Newark multi-sector which I’ve never done before. That was one of the first ones to go from my roster, sadly.

I was also supposed to have a trip to JFK at the end of March but that disappeared as well, and right now I’m home on quarantine. According to the UAE law we have to observe 14 days of quarantine after arriving from our last operating flight, that means not even leaving to go to the supermarket or out for exercise. 

I’m trying to make the most of it and have been trying to do a daily workout from YouTube (although feel free to send any good workouts my way!), experimenting with cooking new recipes, and of course, plenty of Netflix!

In the meantime we can do nothing but stay strong, and hope that we will get our wings back soon and come back better than ever. 

P.s. Follow me on InstagramFacebook & Twitter for more day-to-day updates of where I am in the world! 🙂

Hiking in Hong Kong

I was finally rostered 2 trips back to one of my favourite cities in the world – Hong Kong! My friend Kirsty has just given birth to her second baby, a beautiful daughter named Imogen, and I was so excited to meet her and catch up with Kirsty.

On my first trip out we were still staying in Causeway Bay, so I got the ferry over to Discovery Bay for some drinks and nibbles at her flat, before dinner in a nice restaurant and a good catch up there.

The second time around, our hotel had sadly closed down which meant a new location…the airport. I am so disappointed by this as we really had the most amazing location right in the heart of Hong Kong, but I guess it just means I’ll have to explore new areas!

I met Kirsty around lunchtime at the airport, as she was dropping her parents off to fly back to England after they’d been out to visit for a while. We got straight into a taxi to take us to Mui Wo, where we would start our hike.

First things first, cuddles with baby Imogen!

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