Thursday 25th April 2024
After a long long long day (up at 330am for the Dawn Service) it was time to head out to the airport. I left the lunch venue which was right next to Wynyard Station and went for the old school York Street entrance. After taking a photo of the station entrance and then getting abused by some drunk homeless looking person (he thought I was taking photos of him). I do love the old escalator art in the York Street entrance of the station. They took the old wooden escalators which I remember from when I was a kid and turned it into a gorgeous piece of sculpture art.
I just missed a train so had about 12 minutes to wait for the next one. I decided rather than changing at the train station, I would change at the airport, I feel like the bathrooms would be cleaner. If I didn’t have the spare time, I would just give it up and keep on going. The train was relatively empty, but filled up at Central and then emptied out some at the first Airport stop.
Once I got into Terminal 3 at the airport, I came all the way up to the departures level and it was eeeeempty! YAY! I changed out all my uncomfortable function clothes for some more comfy travel clothes and packed up the suitcase ready to drop off. Using the Qtag I sent the bag into the machine and then got myself a printed boarding pass as my power bank was having some charging issues and I wasn’t sure if I could keep my phone fully charged. They happily printed me a boarding pass and confirmed that the seat map is correct… It was quite empty.
I went through security and this time, not as many problems, however my backpack got pulled aside again. I was so excited to get another secondary screening making it 5 out of 6 flights on this trip in Australia, but they guy reviewed it and then said it is all fine, it timed out because they other guy didn’t look at it properly. What was the dude doing, playing Minecraft?
Once in the terminal, I took a walk to get in some steps and then found my gate and sat down to read. I saw the Retro 1 come into the gate next to mine which I was so jealous about that we would not get that one and the crew off that flight headed into mine. It was at this point I heard the gate agent say “all 20 of them” and I was shocked. If he was legit talking about how many people we had onboard, that was crazy!
Qantas Airways – QF542
Sydney to Brisbane
1720-1850
Boeing 737-800 (VH-VZB)
Economy Class (Seat 23A)
Boarding: 1702 (Gate 2)
Push Back: 1725
Take Off Roll: 1736 (Runway 16L)
Top of Descent: 1815
Touch Down: 1855 (Runway 19L)
Shut Down: 1859 (Gate 24)
Boarding for Business and Priority was called and not a single person stood up. It was at this point the gate agent was like “fine you can now all board, general boarding is open” and like 5 people started standing up. The flight attendant manning the gate had confirmed the amount of people on tonights flight… 22. I was first onboard the plane so got my pictures of an empty cabin and started heading for the back of the plane. I had a row of 3 seats to myself but after the plane was fully boarded in less than 5 minutes, i had about 12 rows to myself on one side of the plane.
They confirmed onboard that yes, this is everyone and that due to weight and balance, please do not move about from your seat for safety. I was ok with this, the one row where they got screwed was a couple who had selected seats with a window and middle next to an already allocated aisle. Woops!
We pushed back a couple of minutes late, probably due to other planes in the alleyway, but we started heading out as the sun began to set. I was hoping we would get a quick take off on 16R, we did not. We had to taxi out all the way to 16L. It was not too much of a hassle, but it just meant we had to wait longer.
We took off out over the water and turned back to head north. The two cruise ships in town could be seen heading out to sea, and the sun was going down as well making for a great sunset as we passed the city off to my left. Once we were up in the air, I put my tablet in the seat back holder and started watching a TV show for our short 1 hour flight up to Brisbane. The flight attendant came up and rather than bringing a cart, decided to just ask us what we would like and then was back moments later. I went with my usual Qantas order, Ginger Beer and a water. About 5 minutes later they rolled out a little cart full of a “warm snack” which was a vegie pizza slice. It wasn’t too bad, but boy was it HOT!
Not a bad offering for free on a flight of an hour. In the states you would be lucky to get even a drink! As the flight went on they made multiple times picking up trash and offering water bottles as well. Right before we started our slow descent we got a little briefing by the pilot letting us know that unfortunately we have a 10 minute delay getting into Brisbane due to being put into a holding pattern. O well, not to worry too much.
We came in over the gold coast tracking north along the beach and headed up all the way over Moreton Island right up to Tangalooma and then turned for the runway. Pretty similar to how we flew in on my flight from Adelaide. We touched down on the runway really roughly and slewed around a bit. Once we exited the runway (thank god in one piece) we headed off to the gate. We pulled in and I had a little chat with the crew while waiting for the doors to open. We were not able to use rear stair deboarding, however with the tiny amount of people, I was not worried.
I headed off into the terminal and figured I would have some time to use the bathroom before going down to get my bag. I need not have rushed at all, because when I got down there, I watched the last of the bags come out from my flight, and mine was not there. Off to baggage services I go. I checked my tile tracker and it’s last update was an hour ago… and still in Sydney…. *Sigh*. They let me know that my bag is on the next flight hopefully and it should land soon enough. I should stick around because it will be about 30-45 minutes. So I sat down and waited. When the new flight landed, they paged me over because they had my bag. YAY. Then it was off to the AirPark shuttle which had to make every stop before making it to where I would get off and then it was a short drive home. Later than I wanted, but it had been a long and fulfilling day.