Sock It to Me

I wanted to post separately about the flight out to Australia, which involved an almost comedically bad sequence of virtually everything that could go wrong on a plane journey going wrong one after another, to the point that it felt almost ridiculous.

My preferred airline and route to Australia is Singapore Airlines and Heathrow-Singapore-Sydney, because the former is just far and away the best of all available airlines flying from Europe to Australia, and the latter breaks up the journey in a way that suits me (plus Changi airport is just about the only major international airport in which it feels almost enjoyable to spend a few hours when you're sleep-deprived, dazed, and in physical pain from spending 10 or more hours sitting down). However, due to a variety of factors, this time around Matthias and I went with Emirates, with the stopover in Dubai. (The deciding factor was that Emirates fly some flights out of/into Standsted airport, which is only 45 minutes away from us by train, whereas Heathrow and Gatwick involve a long time on public transport getting into London, then another hour and twenty minutes on the train back to Ely on a train line that frequently has rail replacement buses for some or all of the line on weekends, and we knew that we would appreciate a quicker and easier return home after the long flight.)

The flight from Stansted to Dubai is only 6.5 hours, and it was completely uneventful. It was only when we moved on to the connecting flight to Sydney that the troubles began.

This started with an announcement on the plane that three passengers had checked in to the flight, but not boarded, so their luggage was going to have to be removed, and we'd need to wait fifteen minutes while this happens. This sort of thing is par for the course on long-haul international flights, so I wasn't too concerned at that point. But then fifteen minutes passed, and another announcement came: there was a big cloud of sand all over Dubai (I'd noticed this as we'd flown in on the preceding flight), and air traffic control were spacing out departures and arrivals for safety reasons, so we'd have to wait another 45 minutes.

The 45 minutes passed (indeed an hour passed), and then another apologetic announcement was made: they'd discovered a leak in one of the galleys, and so engineers needed to come in and fix it, or we might run out of water somewhere over the Indian Ocean. A gaggle of guys in high viz vests trooped in to solve the problem. By this stage I, and a handful of other passengers had moved to stand at the front of the plane, so that we could hear what the flight attendants were saying (delays don't bother me, but being kept in the dark as to the cause and length of the delay really does). They were telling me that these kinds of problems came up fairly regularly on flights, but they'd never experienced them all at once!

After some time, the high viz guys left the plane, and I noticed the flight attendants were having whispered, stressed-looking conversations. The source of their stress was soon revealed: two separate passengers were having medical emergencies (one of whom being a woman who had a milk allergy who had for some inexplicable reason requested and drunk a cup of tea with milk in it!), and a doctor would need to be called. This happened swiftly, and thankfully both sick passengers were checked, treated, and deemed safe enough to fly, so the doctors departed, we were all sent back to our seats, and the flight left, three hours late.

I fell asleep, and woke up somewhere over Western Australia. Normally this means another four hours or so, flying in a straight line across the middle of Australia until Sydney. However, after a little while, there was an announcement over the plane intercom: were there any passengers who spoke French, and if so, could they make themselves known? A couple of older French guys appeared, and were whisked away. A further announcement was made: was there a medical doctor on the plane? Another passenger emerged, and he and the two French guys were moved away to deal with yet another medical emergency! This was a third woman (different to the two previous passengers who had had medical emergencies at the gate in Dubai), and the French passengers were needed in order to translate for her.

At this point, I'd been watching the onboard flight tracker, and had noticed with some concern that it had suddenly switched from saying 'Dubai-Sydney, 2.5 hours remaining' to 'Dubai-Adelaide, 1.5 hours remaining'! I could actually feel that the plane shifted course and turned south, rather than keeping its course flying in a straight line from west to east along the middle of the country. If you look at a map of Australia, Adelaide is in the middle of the country on the southern coast. Sydney is on the middle of Australia's eastern coast, and a flight from the UAE to Sydney should not even pass over Adelaide, as it is too far south.

I asked a passing flight attendant about this change, and whether we were making an emergency landing in Adelaide to get medical care for the sick passenger. He said that it was a possibility, but the captain hadn't yet made up his mind whether this was necessary! For about an hour, the flight tracker definitely thought we were going to Adelaide, and both my brother-in-law and mother (who were tracking the flight online) told us later that online tracking websites had definitely said that our flight was going to land in Adelaide, but thankfully after about an hour heading south, the pilot shifted the plane's course north, the onboard tracker started saying 'Dubai-Sydney' again, and we landed in Sydney as intended, only two hours late. Ambulance workers met us at the gate, the sick passenger was taken off to get medical care, and all was well.

I have actually had much worse flights (including one back from Sydney where we had to make an emergency landing in Kuala Lumpur due to a failure of the plane's computer system, and knowing of the existence of this failure while we were flying over open ocean for several hours, which was absolutely terrifying), but all these things going wrong in succession was something else! The flight itself was actually calm and peaceful (other than the woman with the medical emergency and the possible diversion to Adelaide), and the airline staff handled everything with incredible poise and professionalism; I mean to write to Emirates and compliment their handling of the situation, since it can't have been much fun for them. I'm actually terrified of flying, but I was so busy worrying that we might have to divert to Adelaide that I forgot to be afraid for the entire waking duration of that flight!

The only eventful thing about the return journey was that 10 hours out of the 14 from Sydney-Dubai were so turbulent that the pilots kept the fasten-seatbelt sign on, and at times required the cabin crew to sit in their own seats with seatbelts on as well. This was extremely unpleasant and scary, but — as I kept reminding myself — not on the level of the equivalent flight I'd taken in reverse two weeks earlier!