IR Open Mic - 26-04 - Crazy Stories - Craig Richmond (Season 1, Episode 7)

In this IR Open Mic snip-it, Curtis Grad asks his guest Craig Richmond, former President and CEO of Vancouver Airport Authority and global airport executive to share his craziest story from his varied and intriguing career in the airport sector.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We usually like to talk at this point about a few crazy stories and and in airports it seems to be a place that we attract them. So you must have some pretty good ones from your various stops along the way, but what's what are the the couple of craziest ones that you ever come across in your airport career?

SPEAKER_00 0:16

You know, there's there's crazy good and crazy bad. Um uh we take both. Yeah, well, you know, here's a little known fact about uh 9-11 in uh in North America. That day, I think it was a Tuesday, September 11th, uh 2001, was ACI in Montreal. So all the CEOs of all the airports in North America, uh of NAV Canada, FAA, senior government, everybody was in Montreal. So it was run by guys like me and uh that kind of thing. And all of a sudden, you know, it was surreal in that suddenly, you know, the head of transport locally says the US is shutting their airspace, and you can you take 34 jumbos? Yes. And now to have 8,500 people sitting on your airport going, what am I doing in Vancouver? You know, that was uh bizarre, bad, bizarre funny. You just you go, okay, this is odd. Uh, I'm doing some consulting work in the Middle East in the middle of Ramadan, and we had a finance meeting start at 9:30 at night and end at 2 in the morning, and then we had a banquet. And I'm stuffed full of amazing good iftar food at four in the morning, going, Okay, this one goes in the books. Yes, you know, that's uh, you know, I've pulled all nighters before, but rarely having a banquet. And and then there's the the great customer service stories, you know, that you just go again. When you have people like this, you can't lose. One of our security people comes upon a woman crying in the in the terminal, says, Can I help you? She says, I was nervous. Me and my husband, he's coming back home. I was cleaning my wedding ring. Before you know it, I lost it somewhere out in the parking lot. And the guy said, Do you know where you were? No. He said, Tell me, you know, this is a 3,000-stall parking lot in the dark. He said, Can you tell me any of your members? So he kind of tried to pinpoint where it might have been, spent three hours and found her wedding ring. You know, it just runs the gamut, doesn't it? And I used to enjoy reading the uh the ops logs because it must be what it's like for police, because they would take this huge drama and just put it down to one sentence, you know, and you'd go uh six and a half foot tall, very angry man, brandishing sword at screening point. There's a story there, there's a screenplay, but it's all in one line, you know. And I I often said I should have taken a picture of the strangest ones, you know, um, everything from life and death in between. And that's you know, I think that's part of the reason that people sort of get hooked on airports because you even though every airport has a terminal and a runway, you know, and and has people coming to it, you know, that's about where this the similarities end. And every day can be very, very different. And uh you have no idea that you'd be dealing with this crisis or that crisis. And some people like that, some people don't. I think it gets in some airport operators' blood. You ride to the sound of the guns, right? You you hear, hey, what's that? That's something odd is going on, and you uh and you want to be part of it, you want to fix it.