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October 23, 2007
Leaving New York. Triffic airline-hell story from Andrew Dubber. I hope my journey to New Zealand via the Far East is smoother. (I somehow suspect avoiding the USA was a wise idea.)
I read the entire sad tale and sincerely hope that you are not scheduled to fly Zoom Air.
Where does your flight stop at/where do you change on your way East?
Japan on the way out, which should be fun. China on the way back, which should be interesting!
That said, I expect airports are the same the world over and I won’t see anything of the actual countries.
I will, of course, be blogging the whole thing, for that is what I do.
No parallels at all with when I went to Perth, then. I know it’s a ridiculous amount further by a degree that cannot be fully visualised by looking at an Atlas, but still.
We landed first at Mumbai, and were supposed to stop just long enough to refuel without getting off. It turned out, though, that there had been a terrorist scare earlier on and so we all had to get off the plane while it was searched. We ended up in a terminal of the airport, with some soldiers patroling about now and again. They looked as mean as a human being can facially look, but their rifles appeared to date from the 19th century. It’s a good job there wasn’t a genuine terrorist; if they’d missed with the first shot it would have taken them about three minutes to reload.
After that we changed flights at Singapore. From the bit of it we saw, you could have a long and happy holiday in the airport itself. Stunning.
So, good and bad.
In my experience you have a much better chance of a “good” flight, whatever that really means, if you buy a cheap ticket on a scheduled big name airline like Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, Singapore, Thai or Quantas. Notice I didn’t include BA in this list. Also, there is a distinct advantage in departing from a hub on the airline that calls that hub home. They could easily have a spare plane available should yours be unavailable.
In the extremely limited experience I’ve had, I’d agree with that. My above larks abovementioned were courtesy of Singapore Airlines, and I will say that apart from the Mumbai diversion (which would presumably have happened to anyone on any airline) they were really good. There was plenty of stuff to amuse you in your little screen on the back of the chair in front of you (loads of different films and telly programmes and things, old school Nintendo games to play etc) and the flight attendants were extremely attentive. Neither the peculiar activities of the Indian security forces nor the weird aspects of relative time over that sort of distance/length can be blamed on them.
I can’t compare it to any other airlines over that distance since I’ve only otherwise been on intra-continental flights, but it was much better than I might have expected.