Flying with the Namibian Football Team

Last week Ruth, one of our Africa Regional Managers, and I flew to Windhoek for meetings with our ground agents. We flew down overnight on a Sunday night and back overnight on the Thursday night. The time in Windhoek was great, but pretty tiring with back to back meetings for four days. Ruth somehow managed to get food poisoning on the Wednesday. So by the time we reached Windhoek airport on the Thursday night for our flight home we were both pretty strung out and tired. We looked forward to a quiet 10 hours flying gently back above Africa to the UK. Imagine our delight on getting to the check-in desk to find the plane was taken a diversion – via Accra in Ghana. ‘Why?’ we asked the lovely check-in girl (who looked on the verge of tears, having answered this question about 56 times already). ‘Well, the Namibia Football team needs to get to the Africa Cup of Nations so you’re dropping them off’. Cue, team neatly arriving behind us, girls screaming, photographers flashing, baggage handlers rushing for autographs and a level of excitement Windhoek Airport has never seen in its life. How we loved the check-in girl when she kindly gave us the exit seats. How we then nearly cried to find we were the only non-football team / fans in our entire section of economy.Many fans had never boarded an aircraft before and the stewardesses (who by this time had given up any hope of getting any rest) were kept on their feet for every second of the 5 hour and 32 minute flight to Accra serving food, drinks, trying to get them to sit down when the seat-belt lights were on and perhaps suggesting that singing and shouting all the way to Accra wasn’t a great idea. Still, the stewardess sat in the jump seat opposite us told us that the silver lining to our cloud of economy despair was that in Ghana our entire section of economy would clear out and Ruth and I could bag 4 seats to ourselves, stretch out and snore all the way back to the UK. How excited were we on touching down in Ghana? And then, how far were we flung into the pit of despair when we found out that Air Namibia had somehow managed to flog the spare seats to 135 Ghanians to cover the cost of the extra fuel needed for the diversion.

To cut another long and miserable 6 hours 15 minutes short we did arrive in Gatwick eventually, some 15 hours after we left (the sums do add up if you allow for the time spent on the ground in Accra). Ringing the team in the office to let them know we had eventually arrived they found the whole episode hilarious.Oh well, I thought, in the car on the way home, despite the fact that things like this can be immensely frustrating, working in the Africa department is never ever boring. I wouldn’t swap it for the world. And after all, how many people can say they flew with the Namibian football team?