Travel’s newest perk found on board your flight
Aside from all the check-in palaver, there’s a cheery new upside once you’re on board a flight.
Aside from grim international airport queues, the paperwork, the way the Australian government’s digital passenger declaration app freezes at whim, there’s a cheery new upside once you’re on board a flight. And that’s the safety video. Airlines have gone all out with cheeky and cheery adaptations of the old norm. No more peering at real crew as they show how to buckle seatbelts, affix drop-down masks to an infant or assume the brace position. All so 2019.
Air New Zealand has updated its All Blacks videos to an excellent Maori guardian heritage version. The latest from Qantas honours its Longreach beginnings and takes the retro route, presenting aircraft and crew uniforms from various eras.
A recent flight with Singapore Airlines introduced me to a safety video set in the Peranakan Home Museum with heritage chairs and treasure chests instead of airline seats and overhead compartments.
Qatar has gone all out with a soccer-themed mini-film to tie in with the FIFA World Cup, kicking off in November. It takes the form of a pre-match locker-room pep talk starring players from the likes of AS Roma, FC Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain, with British actor Jason Thorpe as coach. It’s goofy and oddly entertaining. Or at least more delightful than queuing to board a Qatar flight at Rome Fiumicino airport, where arrows often point in three simultaneous directions to (supposedly) a gate, a transit area, a toilet or an ice-cream bar. I am fibbing about that last destination, because who would get cranky about being led to a pre-boarding lemon gelato rather than the departure lane.
The A380 is back and with it the labyrinthine stockyard queues and the long wait for baggage at the other end. Sydney’s international airport had decided that two carousels would be operated for all luggage (some the size of fridges) off our flight, so arriving passengers had to dart to and fro, just in case (sorry) we were at the wrong conveyor belt.
“What the f..k is happening!” shouted an Italian passenger, which was rich, considering the chaos of his homeland’s busiest airport. But he didn’t speak in English, so most fellow passengers just nodded in agreement with whatever he was cross about as the F-word is universal and may well be at its most vocal at airports in 2022.
My bags duly popped out, one on each belt, and I saw them speeding off in the distance as I darted between carousels separated by a phalanx of trolleys blocking the view unless you were an AFL ruck man/woman. Each case was swallowed back inside the metal mouths as I approached but at least I knew there was one bag on each. Timing was everything.
I danced about like a mad thing. I dodged competing passengers and stood guard at the first entry. I lunged at the bag as it approached. I repeated my moves at the sister carousel. I may have been dribbling by this stage. Two own goals to me.