0600 hrs The curfew at Hong Kong International Airport comes to an end. All night, lights have been twinkling impatiently around that tiny spit of man-made land known as the runway. Now the action begins.
0640hrs CX829 from Toronto lands, the first Cathay Pacific flight of the day.
0700hrs Peter Kelly, Duty Manager Operations Control, starts his twelve-hour shift, taking over from Tony Olaes who has been on duty throughout the night. Kelly sits in front of a triptych of computers which tells him the state of play of Cathay Pacific's 59 aircraft. The planes - 747-400s, 747-200s, A340s, A330s, Tristars and freighters - are listed down the main screen. The Universal Time Clock, which is the same as Greenwich Mean Time and is eight hours behind Hong Kong, CHECK is marked off across the top of the main screen.
Each flight appears as a horizontal block of time which begins as a plane takes off and which ends as it arrives at its destination. Kelly can tell exactly how a flight is doing by the colour of this block. Green means that it's on time, pink indicates that it's beginning to drop behind schedule, red yelps that there's a problem. It's a first-glance way of telling whether the day ahead is going to be a dream or a nightmare. On the wall behind, there's a print-out of what the screen looked like on the day in 1993 when a China Airlines plane slid into the harbour during a tropical storm. It is shriekingly scarlet.
Today's screen blushes pink in only a few areas. The inbound plane from London Heathrow, CX254, is running slightly late because of weather conditions en route. Cathay's European flight numbers are all prefaced by '2', its Australian and New Zealand sector flights by '1', its northeast Asian flights by '4' or '5', its Southeast Asian routes by '7' and its north Pacific routes by '8'. Eastbound and northbound flight numbers are always even, westbound and southbound flights are always odd.
There's a more serious delay with CX292, a 747-400 which has been delayed out of Rome airport because of a mechanical problem. Cathay's maintenance control has organised a spare part to be sent from London's Heathrow but the wait has encroached on the crew's strictly-observed duty rosters. This means that the plane now has to go via Bangkok where it will pick up a new crew. It will be seven hours late, scrambling its passengers onward flight connections.