The new Flight Kitchen dedicated just for Emirates is now in full operation here in Dubai and has been since last week. Its a monster kitchen and supposedly the world's largest Flight Kitchen built to capacity of 115,000 meals a day! The migration of Emirates operations from the old kitchen to the new kitchen was a mammoth task, although it was carried out in about 8 phase approach. Kudos to all those involved ! Like everything else, understandably , it would take at least a couple of months to get all operations smoothen up in the new kitchen and I guess, we may have to bear up with on and off minor hiccups and try & support them in any way we possibly can.
This afternoon we had our weekly meeting with EKFC in the Conference Room @ the new kitchen (EKFC1) and overall, the meeting went well. It seems, we have a shortage of meal trolleys to meet flight packing requirements and really cannot understand where the hell these meal trolleys are disappearing ? Some times in the recent past, we've been carrying out trolley counts both out and in and was stoppe, when everything seem going on well. I guess, absence of real time trolley count @ different locations around the world and/or lack or no visibility at all of building up of trolleys have made managing the meal trolleys even more challenging ! Bob mentioned the idea of 'SALIK' tags for trolleys; however, there appear some obstacles quoting 'high costs' to it. It is however, suprising that we are not making concentrated efforts pursue SALIK tags (RFID) methodology, when other areas such as Cargo has already introduced RFID tags to track ULDs and even Airport Services are cosnidering biometrics technology to further improve customer service!