Got kissed by Lady Luck

[facthunter]

I wouldn't believe ONE word HE  (Farage) uttered. Boris Johnson has a lot to answer for over a long period. Nev

[Jerry_Atrick]

And Starmer and his cohorts, sadly, are following suit

[facthunter]

He CAN'T possibly be that BAD. The "House of Lords" is such a fool idea. nev

[Jerry_Atrick]

I would take him over the aforementioned, but it's like taking a fractured arm over a broken one.

[onetrack]

At risk of derailing the political trend of this thread, back to Lotto wins, the good news for today is .........

 

We've got our Business Class upgrade from Broome back to Perth, tomorrow! It cost us another $350 ($175 each, was my bid) - but because we'd already paid extra for exit-row seats with the additional legroom, Virgin have credited us the exit-row charge, so the upgrade only cost us $267 in total.

 

The only downside is, we know we're going travelling on a tired old Virgin B737-800, so it's not exactly a class ride. However, we've found Virgin to be satisfactory to deal with, and the crew are normally cheerful, and the business seating is just fine.

 

We stopped travelling on Qantas when the Leprechaun was running the operation like the miserable greedy turd he is. They regularly cancelled all my FF points because I never used them in the allotted time frame (which in itself, is a miserable, grubby corporate scam) - and Q fares were always much higher than Virgin, anytime we wanted to go anywhere.

 

However, it seems Q has improved under its new CEO, because we flew up on Q, at a considerably reduced fare, compared to what Virgin wanted.

However, to return to Perth, Virgin were much cheaper than Q - so figure that one out?

The flight up with Q was very good, with Q crew cheerful and attentive, and the Airbus was only 21 yrs old! I looked up Q's fleet age and was staggered to see they're still running 32 yr old Fokkers!!

 

Both Q and Virgin are in dire need of a heap of new aircraft, all their fleets are old and creaky, and run into the ground, and I see where Q has had to temporarily lease 4 "mid-life" B737's to fill in a delivery shortfall from Airbus.

AB was supposed to deliver several new A321XLR aircraft to Q this year, but they're way behind schedule, and some of the planned 2025 deliveries will be pushed back into next year.

 

https://australianaviation.com.au/2025/06/qantas-to-lease-4-midlife-737s-to-combat-delivery-delays/

[onetrack]

Well, we've had our "Virgin experience" this afternoon, and it reflects the current state of Virgins (and Qantas') planes. We were due to depart at 2:35PM for a 5:20PM arrival into Perth.

However, as we were having lunch, a check showed the flight was delayed. Got to the airport, and found our aircraft had broken down and a replacement had to be sourced, so it was over half an hour late.

 

That delay extended into a 3:05PM departure, with passengers dragging their feet, a bloke turning up late with 2 kids that he claimed were his (they bore no resemblance), and saying they all needed to be seated together, as that was the airline laws. But he'd booked the three of them at different times and from different places, as the steward pointed out.

Nonetheless, the bloke claimed they were legit, so the steward, under great pressure, but acting with speed and professionalism, re-arranged seating in a virtually full aircraft, by extracting a Virgin employee from a rear seat and placing him in the sole empty business-class seat, and shifting a couple of other people around.

 

With everything settled, we barrelled off into a gusty headwind (my God, it was windy in Broome today, never knew it could blow there like that, in the Dry season), and we rotated very rapidly, and got to great altitude very quickly it seemed.

The flight was pretty smooth, a few bumps, lots and lots of cloud of all sorts and types, lots of haze, and difficult to see any terrain in detail.

We got a nice feed of chicken with potatoes in business, nice comfy seat in a late-model (2013) B737-8FE (VH-YQR), which must be one of Virgins better aircraft - and we landed very smoothly in Perth at 5:48PM - to bitterly cold weather (13° and a promise of 2° tomorrow morning!) Oh, how we'd loved to have stayed another month in Broome!

 

I was studying up on the history of VH-YQR, and discovered it featured in an ATSB incident report, where a similarity to Air India Flight 171 is logged. The incident was a major flight upset caused by an incorrect control selection! I'll post it in the Air India thread, just to add some thought to the AI crash considerations.

[Jerry_Atrick]

That delay cloud defo had a silver lining. The two hour flight I had from London City Airport to Frankfurt was very ordinary. The plane was shappy, seats small, cramped and not too comfy, and it was as noisy as sitting next to the wing on a Dash 8. To top it off, the in flight meal for the 2 hr morning flight was some granola bar. That was a BA flight and I don't normally fly them as they, in my humble opinion, are about theo only western airline that makes QANTAS look OK.  Glad your flight was a good one.