There has been a lot said about the issues with flying QANTAS over the past few months, most of it rather unflattering and certainly very little of it complementary. Something to do with previous management stuffing everything up for everyone apparently, staff included.
Yesterday I had the necessity of flying QANTAS on a trip to Sydney for a PR event hosted by AMD, Hewlett Packard and Blackmagic Design, relating to AI (of course, what else?).
This was my first Sydney trip since COVID, and my first QANTAS flight for a while, being restricted to Virgin for various reasons in my last minimal sojourns in the air – which admittedly have been few and far between since said COVID.
Up front, if you are thinking I am going to say that the QANTAS flight sucked, you’d be wrong. The flight itself was a delight and my first introduction to the new(ish) Boeng 787 Dreamliner. Even in cattle class, it was a damn sight better than any other basic economy by miles, and equivalent to Premium Economy on some airlines. And you get a decent USB charging point yay!
I even got to watch Dune Part 1 right through, and the in-flight entertainment system makes the best home setup look basic (although QANTAS still insist on those crappy twin plug headphones which are rubbish).
The staff were excellent, the food equally so (I had a braised brisket with roast potatoes and onion salsa), the seating very comfortable indeed and the flight was pretty much on schedule. If I had any complaint, it was the air conditioning was too cold. But that is a personal thing.
What did suck though, was the two hours pre-flight and the almost one hour post-flight experience.
You see, in the middle of the night before the flight, I received a text saying that the 11:40am flight time had changed as had the departing terminal. Sure the plane was only going to leave 40 minutes later, and the terminal had switched from T3 to T4, but this meant the flight was now an international one. The preceding leg was in fact the direct flight from Paris to Perth here in Western Australia, which apparently is a mind numbing 17 hours.
As a consequence, the boarding procedure entailed getting a special boarding pass that had to be issued by a staff member, not via the machine, and of course, this meant a queue. And showing photo ID.
From there, it was through the expected standard security with removal of jewellery, belt, hat, watch etc, laptops and tablets out of carry-on and through the screening process. And another l-o-n-g queue.
But then, we had to go through a Border Force check and screening with more photo ID. And then another, again with photo ID. In all, screened three times. Finally, before boarding, yet ANOTHER photo ID check. And more long queues.
Now I understand some bearded clown from his hidey hole cave somewhere in Afghanistan who sent a couple of Boeings into the Twin Towers started all this stuff, but so MANY checks?
I was assured at the “other end”, as we had the special boarding pass with the orange sticker duly domiciled by Border Forces very own rubber stamp, there would be no issue through Customs and Immigration. But this wasn’t quite true.
Those of us just doing the domestic leg of Perth – Sydney still had to queue, and again, have photo ID checked.
In all, the time it took for all this security, in Perth and again in Sydney, was only an hour less than the flight time of 4 hours!
Which, and maybe it’s just me, is patently ridiculous.
Perhaps Qantas is partly to blame, switching the flight in order to fill the seats on a less than full plane. I’ll never know. But at least for the departure part, surely there could be some streamlining done to make the process easier?
I was getting cranky; I am glad I wasn’t a family travelling with kids.
The return leg tomorrow is with Virgin, and it is domestic only (so far anyway) and it will be interesting at least to compare the in-flight experience.
