No trip is complete without at least one major incident. (Murphy’s Law in action, once again.)
When our visiting Serbian team took off from Arlanda airport this Tuesday to return home, it turned out that the transponders on the airplane were broken. Those are the things that make the plane visible to the flight control towers (a complement to radar and also used for collision avoidance with other airplanes).
In other words, flying without transponders is a big no-no, so the plane had to turn around, and our Serbian friends ended up spending the entire night at the airport before they could finally leave the next day.
Above: Yes, it made the news (this is from a Swedish text TV news summary.)
Translation:
Technical alarm on Arlanda airplane
A Boeing with 107 passengers encountered technical problems after take-off from Arlanda airport and ended up having to turn around and go back.The alarm went off early on Tuesday evening when the transponders on a Boeing on its way to Belgrade turned out to be malfunctioning. The transponders make the airplane visible on the screens at the airport.
We would call that a bug…
And of course the whole team spent their entire night at the airport programming new features for Pingdom on their laptops, fuelled by insane amounts of coffee, Coke and Red Bull.
(Yes, that last part was a joke…)
