FIFO - Fly in, Fly out is where you work far away from your place of residence. So far away that you need to fly there and so far away that to make it viable you need to stay on the job site for a set number of days before returning home. This arrangement is called a roster. Some typical rosters are the 2/1 ( Two weeks on, one week off), 3/1 ( Three weeks on, one week off ) and the 8/6 ( Eight days on, six days off ). There are many others and they differ from job site to job site but these are the most common. FIFO is a very common type of employment in Australia and has played a major role in the history of this country. Most FIFO jobs are generally in the mining or oil and gas sectors but there are other industries where this type of employment could be demanded.
I have worked FIFO for five years and in those five years, been on an incredible journey that I want to share with you and document here on Steemit. I wish I had documented the stories as they occurred but I'll do my best to reconstruct them from memory and the little documentation I do have. My hope is to enlighten those curious about this type of career and to help those in this type of career with some of the challenges that FIFO can present. I am especially interested in sharing some of the challenges I faced as a musician working in these remote locations.
My first day
So let me tell you a short story about my first day of FIFO. I had been in Australia for a week and a half after flying over from South Africa. In that period I attended inductions in Perth CBD and also took care of setting up the family with some daily living necessities. I also bought a small second-hand car for my wife so that she could get around whilst I was away. After buying the car and a couple other basics, I had almost spent all the money I came over with and welcomed the day I had to fly out to work as I needed to get money coming in asap. Even after all the inductions and back and forth emails, I still had no idea what FIFO was going to be like.
At the time, I couldn't find any information about what the job site would look like or what type of facilities existed there. The emails were not very informative and Google wasn't helping either. As we naturally do, I started to paint my own picture of what to expect. I imagined flying in a small single prop type plane, landing on a dirt airfield where we'd live in tents and would cook our own meals on a campfire. I was happy with that as I love camping but also slightly concerned about how I would keep the venomous snakes at bay.
An instructional email contained my travel details: Departing from terminal 3, Perth domestic. Check-in closes at 05:00. So to get there in time, it was a 03:30 wake up for me. I also slept very little the night before too, maybe only three hours in total because I was playing various scenarios through my mind about what to expect. After making my way through check-in and security I arrived in the waiting room and noticed hundreds of droopy-eyed people wearing either orange or yellow high vis workwear similar to what was supplied to me. My first thought was "We're going to need a lot of planes."
After biting off nearly all my nails, the announcement came through that my flight was boarding. As I stood in the queue I began to notice that there were a lot more people than could fit on a small plane and it was only then that I realised we must be flying in something larger. I had been very naive. I followed the crowd through the gate then onto the tarmac where I saw our plane; a Fokker 100 ( Hundred seater ) twin turbine jet. That absolutely blew my mind. I could not believe that there were a hundred people flying out to this mine site. "What do they all do there?" "Where do we land this plane in the middle of the desert?" I began to ponder.
Just after takeoff and after all the formalities, they dimmed the lights and the plane went silent. Almost everyone fast asleep in their seat. We were in the air and it was only 6 am. Some people had flown from interstate the night before whilst others could have woken up as early as 1 am to drive to the airport. I fought the urge to close my eyes but did not win. I woke up with my head hanging into the aisle when the announcement came to prepare for landing. The cabin lights turned on and everyone started shuffling around just as dazed and confused as I was. I remember looking past two gentlemen to get a glimpse out the window as we touched down and noticed a new world of red dirt and small shrub-like vegetation.
Nobody was in any rush to get out of the plane and neither was too much joyful conversation was going on. As it was my turn to step out of the plane and down the stairs, I remember the shock of the extreme ambient air temperature. It felt like the heat wave in your face you experience when you open the door of an oven. It was only maybe 07:45 in the morning and it must have been in the high forties already at my best guess. I followed the line of very unenthused people to the gate where the crowd was gathering to wait for their luggage. I was greeted by a lady also in high vis workwear holding up a board with my name handwritten on it.
My entire concept of this first step was completely disproved. I had just landed in a jet in the middle of the Pilbara of Western Australia on an airfield that was purposely built next to a mine. As I discovered, there were two flights a day each carrying an average of a hundred people to and from this single mine site. This was beyond anything I could have imagined. So did I sleep in a tent that night? Well, you'll need to read about that in the next post......
