Pizza and beer are being delivered by plane to remote ranches in the Australian outback in an attempt to bring a slice of cheer to those in extreme isolation amid a COVID-19 lockdown.
The Dunmarra Wayside Inn, a usually bustling roadside diner in Australia’s Northern Territory, used a small fixed-wing aircraft for a trial run of what it hopes will become a weekly flying takeaway service to far-flung cattle stations.
“The station that we did send them to absolutely loved them, so much that they ate them for breakfast the next morning,” Ben Anderson, the inn’s manager and pizza cook, told reporters on Friday.
The business had tried to keep the service under wraps until it was certain the plane deliveries would work.
“We’ve put in a massive pizza oven, which we kept extremely secret,” Anderson said.
However, news of the tasty drop-off proved too hot to handle and on Friday he was fielding calls from reporters — with one radio station asking if he could deliver to their studio in Perth, more than 3,000km away.
“That’s probably a bit out of our range,” Anderson said.
At the moment, Anderson and his team are only planning to fly to properties within 100km.
The idea was cooked up as travel restrictions bit into the outback’s peak tourist season, stopping the usual stream of caravans and months of booked-out rooms.
Regional travel in the Northern Territory remains strictly controlled, with large swathes in lockdown over fears for remote indigenous communities who experts warn could be particularly susceptible to an outbreak due to higher rates of chronic illness.
The idea to fly pizzas and other supplies to remote properties was more about supporting those in the area than simply a business venture, the inn’s owner, Gary Frost, told national broadcaster ABC.
“We’re just doing it as a friendly gesture to try and help people out,” Frost said.
Under the restrictions, even fly-in, fly-out deliveries have to be left at the door for residents to pick up.
“I said to the boss: ‘Maybe we should just get parachutes and drop them out the sky,’ but you never know where they’re gonna end up,” Anderson said.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS