Friday 8th March 2024
Woke up this morning at the Artura Adelaide Airport and had a lazy morning with some breakfast in the hotel (included in my rate) and having a nice conversation with the wife. Once it was time to leave it was pretty simple. Lift down to the lobby, check out and then walk across the hotel lobby, directly into the Arrivals area of the airport and up the escalators to departures. Then just walk up to the Rex area. It was going to be a new experience with a new airline for me today.
Check in was doing pretty well until my bag was rejected by the bag drop machine. Then I had to go get it seen by someone who fixed it all up. Once that was cleared up it was off to security, where BOTH of my bags got pulled aside to be searched AND they made me take off my belt even though it has been fine in other places. Sigh. It eventually got all cleared up. After that I just walked down to the gate and just sat down and used the free wifi for a bit catching up on life.
After a while the inbound plane showed up and everyone deplaned. They had just wheeled out the the carry on scales and I began to panic. They had clearly stated that the combined weight of your carry on and personal item was to be no more than 7KG. My Camera bag, the carry on, weighed over double that. O boy…. Thankfully, no one ever said anything about it.
Regional Express – ZL906
Adelaide to Brisbane
1030-1230
Boeing 737-800 (VH-8KH)
Economy Class – Seat 3A
Boarding: 1002 (Gate 12)
Push Back: 1027
Take Off Roll: 1036 (Runway 23)
Top of Descent: 1151
Touch Down: 1212 (Runway 19L)
Shut Down: 1217 (Gate 38)
Boarding was called in normal Australian fashion. Pre Board, Business Class and then… BUM RUSH!. Yet this system works here because theres no 15 zones, no one is holding stuff up, they use two doors to load the plane and they can fully load the plane in less than half an hour, something you can not do in the states. The process looks like bedlam and it usually is, but it just works.
I got my boarding pass scanned and headed on down the ramp towards the jetbridge. Nothing was said about my carry on, so that slid past. I stepped onto the aircraft and while the outside was Rex, the inside was still Silk Air. It looked identical to Silk Air, down to the seats and that was something. Rex has a mixed bag fleet of some ex Virgin and some Ex Silk Air aircraft. It does the job. At least they kept a similar Row 3 to the other Ex Virgin Aircraft and that is the seat I had preselected today for an extra couple of bucks. Worth every cent!
Got myself situated in my seat and made sure my backpack was in the overhead bin as there was no storage in the row in front in this row as theres no curtain, its a hard bulkhead. It was looking to be a busy flight and someone showed up for the middle but she asked to move closer to the bathroom as she was pregnant, so they moved her right up the back… I will try not to take it as an insult. Meant a middle seat free!
We closed up early and were off the gate and to the runway very quickly. This was good, but then we had to hold. But once the NJE Q400 touched down, we turned onto the active and only had to hold for 30 seconds before it was our turn. We took off out of Adelaide and the seatbelt sign went off once we cleared 10,000ft. Totally unlike the states! But once that was done, not many people were moving about, no one really did much. I didn’t move much at all. I watched some videos on my phone and they brought around a choice of either Water, Tea or Coffee (had water) and some free mini cookies as a snack. Not much to choose from, not much to complain about to be honest.
The flight just passed away really quickly and soon enough we started to have our descent into Brisbane. I figured we had started descent really late, and we didn’t really start descending until over Toowoomba and the outskirts of Ipswich. We did go a loooong way out of the way to descend with a turn for final over Tangalooma. That was a shock to me and totally out of the way.
We came in on what is now the Left runway, aka the old runway when coming from over the bay, I was hoping for the new runway but its ok, got a few more flights to tie that one up and then we headed into the gate area. Being Rex it was heading to the common user gate area so that was a first for me for a looooong time.
We pulled in and while they took a while getting the jetbridge connected, eventually we were let loose into the terminal. I walked out into a terminal that looked absolutely nothing the way it had and it was also the first time in a very long time that my folks had not met me at the airport. They are getting older and not really driving much these days, so I was on my own for getting from the airport to the house, which is what Uber is for right? I waited for my bag and just like anywhere else in the world that isn’t the USA, my bag took forever. O well, at least it showed up. I headed out to the curb to the rideshare pick up and waited for my ride. Time to head “home”, it had been a long week of travel.