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‘My cheese sandwich was cold’
Armed only with a laptop, scholar Simon Quinn did what his own government couldn’t, evacuating 2000 Australians trapped in India over COVID. Then the whingeing started.
By RICHARD GUILLIATT
Simon Quinn in lockdown near Delhi. Picture: supplied
From The Weekend Australian Magazine
June 20, 2020
14 MINUTE READ
79
If you were looking for the ideal person to orchestrate an airlift of 2000 people trapped in a foreign country during a lethal pandemic, Simon Quinn might not be your first choice. Quinn is a mild-mannered, bespectacled 32-year-old Sanskrit scholar from Sydney who lives in a tiny one-bedroom house outside New Delhi and teaches English on the side – which is to say, international crisis management is not his usual thing. Then again, 2020 has been that kind of year – the kind of year in which one man armed only with a laptop, a Facebook account and inexhaustible patience can pull off an emergency mass evacuation that proved beyond the capabilities of his own government.
Quinn still sounds bemused by it all, like a man who’s passed through a cyclone and can’t quite remember the details. Even now – after five planeloads of people have been safely spirited out of India; after he’s been hailed on Facebook as a hero, a saviour and the human embodiment of God’s shining light – he’s not exactly sure how to sum up the whole mad enterprise. “It has,” he says, “been a weird experience.”
Like so many weird experiences these days, it started on the internet. On March 24 Quinn was at home in Gurgaon, 30km southwest of Delhi, when the Indian government announced a sudden and draconian nationwide lockdown to halt the spread of COVID-19 among the country’s 1.38 billion people. On his laptop, he logged into a chat forum for Australians travelling in India; anxious messages scrolled across his screen. All regular airline flights into and out of India had been stopped, which meant more than 6000 Australians – tourists and Indian-Australians visiting family – were stuck with no exit plan as television news reports spoke of possible food shortages and showed Indian police beating people in the streets.
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Quinn himself was calm – he’d been living in India since 2017, having moved there after studying Sanskrit at the Australian National University in Canberra. Semi-fluent in Hindi and married to a local, he is also one of those people who seems constitutionally incapable of panic. For many Australians, however, the situation felt genuinely desperate: some were running out of medications; some had flu-like symptoms and were stuck in hospitals without food awaiting Covid test results; others were effectively homeless as hostels shut down and hotels refused to take them. Families travelling with elderly, wheelchair-bound relatives were anxious to get them home to safety.
“It became apparent that a lot of foreigners were seriously suffering here because of the lockdown,” Quinn recalls. So he launched an open-access spreadsheet on WhatsApp for them to register their details; within a week, more than 1000 people had joined up and he’d become the de facto administrator of a crisis line, assisted by half a dozen other expats scattered around India. People were desperate to know when the Australian government would send charter flights to get its citizens out of India – something the US, UK, Germany, France, Ireland and Canada had already done. But Australia’s High Commissioner to India, former NSW premier Barry O’Farrell – newly arrived in Delhi and only weeks into his job – was posting videos on Twitter that recommended patience and spoke vaguely about efforts being made.
On March 28, Quinn created a Facebook page called Australians Stuck In India and began orchestrating a media and lobbying campaign to pressure the Australian government, posting a template email for people to send to consular officials. This was “basically a stupid thing to do”, he admits now; he hadn’t realised the High Commission in Delhi was operating on a skeleton staff, having lost 90 per cent of its support workers due to the lockdown. Now it was being bombarded with up to 1000 inquiries a day. “So the deputy [head of mission] called me and said: ‘Please take that down from your page’,” he recalls. Quinn gleaned that Australia’s efforts to organise repatriation flights were floundering because neither Qantas nor Virgin flies direct to India (they use partner airlines), and negotiations with other operators were proving difficult. Then he found out that a firm in Brisbane, Monarc Global, was offering to help rescue stranded Australians.
Brendon Hempel. Picture: Josh Robenstone
Monarc Global doesn’t actually own any planes – it operates an internet booking system for charter flights. But its enterprising owner, an expat Canadian pilot named Royce Crown, had spotted news reports about Aussies stranded overseas and announced on his website that he was ready to help. Quinn spoke to Crown, who directed him to Melbourne charter company Stratos Group Aviation, run by another pilot-turned-entrepreneur, Brendon Hempel. Which is how Simon Quinn found himself discussing aviation logistics with Hempel one night over WhatsApp.
“I don’t really understand the technical stuff,” Quinn admits. “But Brendon Hempel and Royce Crown had been flying medical supplies in from China, and I asked Brendon: ‘Would it be possible to do this with humans?’ ” Hempel, who mistakenly thought Quinn worked for the Australian government, threw himself into the task of costing the flights. “I thought Simon was in some sort of diplomatic or political role working for the consulate,” he recalls. “I wasn’t clear how he fit into the whole thing until about a week or two in. It turned out he wasn’t benefiting financially, nor did he have any duty-of-care obligation toward the passengers, which seemed amazing to me. He’s just an average Joe with a Facebook account who was talking to the High Commission.”
Hempel contacted the Indonesian airline Lion Air, which flies regularly to India, and worked out that renting an Airbus A330 with a full crew for a Delhi-to-Melbourne run would cost around $650,000 – paid upfront. If anything went wrong, or not enough seats were filled, his company would wear the loss. He was mulling this over one night when someone posted a video on his WhatsApp stream showing an Australian tourist trapped in a Delhi hotel room, running out of food, with a sign stuck to his door identifying him as a foreigner. “I think it was 11 o’clock at night and I’d had one or two red wines,” Hempel recalls, “and I thought: ‘Bugger it, let’s do this’. Whether we recouped the money or not, it was a genuinely scary situation that people were in.”
Royce Crown. Picture: Justine Walpole
In Brisbane, Royce Crown had calculated that $2200 a ticket would probably get them above break-even if they filled a plane, so he and Hempel began making plans for two initial Delhi to Melbourne flights on April 10 and 16. There was one major snag with this plan: Crown’s firm, Monarc Global, did not have a passenger ticketing system because it deals mainly with freight charter flights. “I had 15 of my staff developing a ticketing system, along with a cancellation and complaints department,” Crown recalls. “It was almost like running an airline.” In Delhi, meanwhile, Quinn was beginning to sense that the Australian foreign affairs officials, who were being flayed on social media, might be willing to lend his efforts a hand.
Why Australia took so long to organise repatriation flights out of India is a subject the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade declines to answer, but it appears to be a story of red tape and poor planning. Whatever contingency plans the Australian government had devised for a global pandemic, it apparently failed to account for the fact that Qantas and Virgin do not fly to India, and reconfiguring Delhi Airport to process their planes would be difficultgiven that India’s civil aviation systems were effectively shut down. Nor were Australian airline staff and their unions enthusiastic for the flights after 11 Qantas cabin crew contracted coronavirus on a repatriation flight from Chile. Air India staff had likewise been infected while carrying passengers from the US, and negotiations with that airline also bogged down because its crew costs were prohibitive.
Quinn came to sympathise with High Commission staff in Delhi, who were copping much of the abuse over this imbroglio. “Some of that criticism may be warranted,” he says. “But I think it should be more directed towards Canberra, because the Australian government at large handled this issue very poorly.”
It was around this time that senior staff in the High Commission began to consider the unlikely scenario that their saviour from this nightmare might be an obscure expat Sanskrit PhD student living in the suburbs of Gurgaon. “Here’s a guy who’s never been involved in anything like this, and he’s contacting charter aircraft companies and telling us he thinks he has the passenger numbers,” recalls a High Commission staffer. “Over the course of a week we began to realise, ‘Hey, he might actually pull this off’.”
Although Lion Air flew regularly to India and was already logged into its airport system, Quinn still needed Indian government approval at the highest level. At the Australian end, he needed both state and federal government approval to get his planes into Melbourne airport and the passengers checked through immigration and shepherded to their quarantine hotels.
Lion Air had committed to the flights, and the Australian government might well have taken control of the operation if not for the airline’s safety record, which had taken a hit in 2018 when one of its Boeing 737s crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 people. Quinn surmised that the government would help him as long as it didn’t have to wear responsibility for the flights. So behind the scenes, Australian foreign affairs officials began smoothing his path with Indian aviation authorities and linking their computers to Monarc’s makeshift ticketing system. In Delhi, High Commission staff collected details of the passengers to pass them on to Indian officials so police roadblocks would permit them passage to the airport.
On April 8, only two days before Lion Air’s firstplane was due to leave Delhi, Quinn posted a notice on the Facebook page: “We, a small group of Australians stuck in India, are now arranging charter flights from India to Australia. The Australian High Commission, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Home Affairs are aware of this and we are in direct contact with all three.” The post provided links to carefully worded documents he and his team had prepared on ticketing arrangements, ground transport, baggage and other contingencies. By the following day all 444 seats had sold, which would have been a cause for celebration were it not for the fact that the Easter holiday meant most of the money would not arrive for days and Hempel was faced with using his own bank account to pay Lion Air $1.3 million.
“Yeah, quite a risk – not something we would do, ordinarily,” comments Hempel, who recalls feeling somewhat stressed as he sat in his office and pushed the button on the transfer. “But our first objective was getting the airplanes, and then hopefully we can fill them with enough bums.”
By now Quinn’s Facebook page had blossomed into a teeming human multitude congregating inside different subject threads, each a cacophony of questions. Quinn was getting two to three hours’ sleep a night, chained to his laptop the rest of the time as he posted long, lucid explanatory edicts while slogging through a blizzard of anxious inquiries from passengers and wannabe-passengers. Will the plane have vegetarian food? What if my visa has expired? Can I check in more than one bag? Will the plane have vegetarian food? Are any of the passengers suffering coronavirus? Can I smoke on the balcony of my quarantine hotel in Melbourne? Will the plane have vegetarian food?
“Simon’s an interesting guy – a typically relentless, task-orientated male,” laughs Hempel. “He was a man possessed, and I’m not sure exactly why.” Staff inside the High Commission were following it all with a certain sense of wonder. “I don’t know when the guy slept, he seemed to be answering questions at all hours,” says one. “We have teams of people trained and paid to do this kind of work; he’s a guy who took on the job voluntarily, dealing with people who were incredibly anxious, sometimes angry. We just really admired his ability to deal with it all.”
Quinn does recall that his hair began falling in a steady stream onto his computer keyboard but is otherwise heroically understated. “I was in lockdown anyway, so I didn’t have much going on. Once I started it, I felt like I had a responsibility.”
The first flight was an exercise in chaos: departure was pushed back a day due to airport issues, so tickets had to be reissued; passengers turned up at the airport with absurd amounts of luggage and tickets with misspelt names; people trying to reach Delhi were calling in from roadblocks where they were being detained. A woman with leukaemia, desperate to get home for chemotherapy, contacted Hempel on WhatsApp late one night from just outside Delhi. “It was three hours before she was due to be picked up and there was a herd of elephants on the only approach road into town. She said, ‘Brendon, what do I do?’ By this stage it’s 2am in Melbourne and I was a bit delirious with exhaustion so I suggested she message me the elephants’ WhatsApp details and I’d talk to them.”
Against all odds, every passenger made it onto the plane, where Lion Air cabin crew greeted them dressed in hazmat suits, masks and goggles. Departure was delayed for eight hours because of Customs, the plane was packed to the gills, there were 35 cranky children aboard and the in-flight meal was by all reports not Michelin quality, but photos taken inside the aircraft show a jubilantly happy group of passengers arriving in Melbourne 30 hours later. “For about 24 hours, I was in bliss,” recalls Royce Crown. Then came the backlash.
In a spirit of generosity he came to regret, Crown had told passengers that if the planes were filled to capacity and all costs were covered, Monarc might pay partial refunds. By the time the second Lion Air flight left Delhi on April 16, he realised his fuel and airport costs were far higher than expected and hastily put an end to that offer. But some people began demanding refunds within hours of arriving at their quarantine hotels, then grumbled on Facebook when the money was not immediately sent. Others seemed to assume Monarc had put on the flights as a money-making exercise and griped that Lion Air did not provide children’s meals, that the entertainment system on the plane hadn’t functioned or that the view from the hotel room in Melbourne was terrible.
“We got a few compliments, which was really nice, but they were few and far between,” Crown recalls. “Anything that went wrong – any delays, complaints about luggage – we got hit with it. One of our girls was in tears twice a day because of being yelled at. We were told what a horrible company we were, how could we do this? It took a toll.”
“We were all in different time zones,” says Hempel, “so I’d catch a few hours’ sleep and wake up to a mountain of WhatsApp messages, thinking: ‘What’s happened – have we lost a plane?’ No, it’s just a cold cheese sandwich in Row 32.”
Quinn and his team, frantically trying to organise flights out of Chennai and Mumbai in India’s south, were deeply aggrieved by the social media speculation that they were profiteering. The rumours probably weren’t helped by an SBS report that falsely claimed the rescue operation was being “spearheaded” by Jagvinder Singh Virk, a Sydney property developer and businessman. Virk, whose strong Liberal Party connections make him a contentious figure in Australia’s Sikh community, had popped up on the Facebook page early on, offering video explainers in Hindi and help via his Liberal Party and Indian government contacts. By mid-April he was granting interviews and being hailed as a hero in Indian media. “He kind of just appeared one day,” laughs Quinn, who appreciated Virk’s help in contacting Indian authorities but found himself caught in the crossfire of Liberal/Labor Sikh politics for a while.
The whingeing on Facebook eventually became too much even for Quinn, who abandoned his imperturbable patience to deliver a few memorable rebukes. “I’m sorry to hear about your hellish experience,” he told one unhappy customer. “Unfortunately, I believe your ordeal might continue in your taxpayer-funded five-star hotel room, as I am hearing awful incidents of people being delivered undercooked peas and there being excessive dust behind lamps.”
On April 19 and 20, three more Lion Air jets left India bearing Australian passengers, the final flights from Mumbai and Chennai being redirected to Adelaide at the last minute in one final moment of chaos. Five planes had brought 2013 people home and Quinn’s team was ready to arrange more, but the Australian government was now determined to organise its own flights, if only to save face. On April 23, it announced it had put on Qatar Airways and Qantas flights out of India, and Quinn’s team decided its work was done.
In the wash-up, Royce Crown estimates his firm Monarc Global lost about $50,000 on the enterprise after paying a $51 refund to everyone on the first flight; Brendon Hempel’s Stratos Aviation made a small profit after paying a $200 rebate to seniors and children under 10. Simon Quinn received absolutely no material reward, although one female passenger did suggest they get married and scores of people took to Facebook to shower him with praise and adulation.
As late as a few weeks ago, he was still extricating himself from his role as saviour and shining light, as Australians still stuck in India bombarded him with questions about government repatriation flights in the mistaken belief he was organising them. “I had to give up my own life and routine for about six weeks but, all in all, I made some lifelong friends and met some fascinating characters,” he says. “I guess it was a privilege, really, to help that many people.”
