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Category: Flying

  • Journey’s beginning

    Journey’s beginning

    The sky is silver. It is the day before our journey begins, my first international trip in three and a half years. The bags are almost packed, the housework done. Tomorrow afternoon we go to the hotel near the airport to stay a night before our early departure. For so long through the pandemic I… Read more

  • Parap it’s time to go home

    I wake in time to see the sun just risen over the horizon. The masted boat has moved, across from one side of the mud flat to the other. I both wish to return home and to stay right where we are. I’m enjoying the relaxing escape from normal life, but I do miss the… Read more

  • The Beagle has landed

    Almost a year and three quarters since I last touched the skies. It was probably the longest period between flights since I began flying again in 1991. After the pandemic struck and we were forced to stay home there were many times when I missed flying. The escape, the isolation, the distant horizons. I realised… Read more

  • A long time since

    A long time since

    For the first time in one and three quarter years we are back at the airport and about to fly. It’s good to be back, but I do feel anxious. Read more

  • 100 years of Qantas

    Today marks Qantas’ centenary, starting from a bush airline in outback Queensland to an international powerhouse today. Sadly, the airline’s 100th birthday celebrations have been muted by the global Coronavirus pandemic, its largest aircraft, the Airbus A380, gathering dust in the Californian desert, its most iconic aircraft, the Boeing 747, finally retired this year. So… Read more

  • Farewell to the Queen of the Skies

    It had to be Brighton. Almost nineteen years ago, less than two months after those aircraft crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, we set out on our first flight on a Qantas Boeing 747, the Queen of the Skies. It was not our first flight on a 747, that came a few years… Read more

  • War, democracy and a jumbo jet

    Thanks to COVID-19, Alex’s long awaited school camp to the Snowy Mountains and Canberra was cancelled. Fortunately we have already given him greater snow experiences both overseas and in the mountains, but he was really looking forward to tours of the National Capital, having studied Australian democracy during the past couple of terms. This time… Read more

  • Qantas 747 Sydney Farewell

    It is confirmed. After almost fifty years, Qantas will farewell its Boeing 747 jumbo jet from service. Before the last 747, VH-OEJ, flies off to the boneyard in the United States on July 22, Qantas announced it would operate three farewell flights with passengers in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra. I was unsuccessful in booking seats… Read more

  • Chicken or beef?

    When you are thirty thousand feet in the air the choice is usually very simple. Do you want the chicken, beef, fish or vegetarian? Usually it’s not even that, but it’s your choice, limited though it is. Stuck here on the ground, it all depends what in the freezer and what the rest of the… Read more

  • And we are off!

    And we are off!

    It’s up, up and away on our virtual trip to Japan aboard a Qantas A330-300 to Osaka. Sydney’s Central Business District and the famous Harbour Bridge can be seen in the background. Read more

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