It’s a story from the 1980s that I read perhaps a decade later.
A young bean counter for British Airways was crunching the numbers in the airlines’s back offices in London. Think someone sitting at a desk with a green screen IBM computer who’s staring over a column of expenditures showing the breakdown to cover the costs for a BA flight near or far.
Pouring over the figures, he suddenly notices that, over many months, there seems to be a glitch: the daily BA flights coming back from Nairobi, Kenya to London are sucking far more jet fuel cost-wise than the flights going down to Nairobi. Considerably more. But why?
He speculates that perhaps the extra costs are due to variables: altitudes, weight loads, time of day or night, seasons, weather, flight patterns, maybe more passengers coming back, types of jets. But why oh why are BA’s planes burning remarkably more fuel arriving back in Heathrow than going down to Nairobi?
Like a wise sleuth from a mystery novel, he investigates. A lot. Doggedly. Something’s just not quite right here, his hunch tells him. He runs into obstacles, roadblocks, diversions, but won’t give up.
Eventually, after months of investigation, he uncovers that there’s a black market for live Indian Ocean lobsters being sold in Great Britain. It becomes clear that the British Airways pilots are quietly, secretly involved in a clandestine, undercover racket: their BA flights returning from Kenya are loaded with cases of fresh lobsters (packed in sea water for freshness) for high end UK restaurants.
The heavy cases packed with sea water add considerably to the cargo weight coming back. In Nairobi, the live lobsters are loaded for free into the hold of the BA jets @ Kenyatta Airport for the return flight to London. Payoffs are made. Everyone has a cut from the deliveries–Kenyan lobster fisherman to airport officials to cargo operators (both Nairobi & London) to UK seafood suppliers. But the big winners, with the largest cut, are the greedy pilots. They’ve been lining their pockets surreptitiously for years with illegally procured contraband at the unsuspected expense of their airline employers.
Until a bean counter senses something’s not…quite…right.
Pilots are fired.
Craig D. Forrest's Blog 