LET'S start with another story from the new airport. We are pleased to report a tale of heroism on a crowded escalator.
A reader, who prefers to remain anonymous, rang to complain about the escalator running from the arrival gates to the people-mover two floors below.
Modestly, he failed to mention his own act of gallantry until later in the story.
Coming off a packed plane, he found himself entering the terminal with the collected payload of three or four other large jets, all disembarking at neighbouring gates and converging on a single escalator.
In uncrowded conditions, it might be safe to suspend an escalator in mid-air with only a waist-high glass panel between passengers and a nine-metre drop. In that crowd, however, our reader found himself in danger of being pushed over the edge. Meanwhile, two very small children, separated from their mother in the maelstrom, were being squashed against the side.
'They were in total panic. They were crying. I pushed forward and picked them up,' said our reader. 'It was so crowded even when we got to the bottom, it took several minutes to find their mother.' But the point he wanted to make was about planning. No one seemed to have planned for crowds.
We put this to Airport Authority spokesman, Chris Donnolley. He saw there might be a problem, 'if lots of planes arrive at the same time', and agreed that this might happen pretty frequently.