So here I am, sitting at Oslo airport terminal, waiting for my plane to arrive at the gate. I do love this airport. It’s so well designed and runs like clockwork.
Anyway, the weekend started by leaving work at 4pm, rushing and panicking to get to the airport, while thinking 3hrs wasn’t enough to make it from Canary Wharf to Heathrow. How wrong was I. But can you blame a guy for not trusting the London transport and their ridiculous excuses for delays.
The check-in guy told me to go to gate 4, which is at the other side of terminal 4. Which I thought was weird, since most of the times they don’t really have a clue as to what gate it will be, that early in checking. So I shuffled along to gate 4, where some rude Indian guy informed me that he wasn’t working at that gate and I shouldn’t ask him any more questions.
Parked my arse down on a chair and fitted the last bits of duty free I had purchased for Espen (my Norwegian friend). Whilst sitting, I looked over to the terminal screens which show the gates and whatnot, only to see Oslo disappear from the screen, which was rather alarming. Not really caring at that moment, I carried on staring into space.
20 minutes before boring, the gate changed and they decided to warn everyone to move to a new gate, number 23. Yes, it was at the OTHER fucking side of the airport, a good 10 minutes walk. BASTARDS. So we take off, on time (yeah, I was surprised too) considering it was a British Airways flight.
Pretty smooth flight, and I managed to pass-out for about 1.30hrs, only to get woken up by the captain warning of heavy fog at Oslo, and that he will be using a fully automatic approach and landing. Which is cool, because I’ve never really experienced that before. At this stage, the woman next to me is shitting bricks because she hasn’t experienced it either and doesn’t trust the whole fly by wire process. So she asks me all sorts of questions about the safety and whatnot, and I do my best to calm her down.
It was bloody foggy, and we didn’t see a thing until about 2 meters before touch-down. All in all, it was a very smooth approach and landing. Quite impressive for a little Airbus A319. Considering it was being blown about like a leaf. In face it was so nice, that woman sitting next to me turned and said, “Hey maybe we should ask them to use automatic landing every time, at least I’d be a little less scared”. The captain wished us a good day and mentioned again that this was an automatic landing. Dude, we get it. You’re proud you did nothing to assist.
So met up with Espen at the exit (UT in Norse) and we drove to his flat to drop stuff and maybe meet-up with a few of the other guys for drinks.