Transcript:
So, just as a follow-up from my previous post, the travel travails carried on. When I got to Heathrow airport on the Wednesday, I was a little bit alarmed to see the gate coming up a bit later than planned, which made me feel like something was up. But it wasn't until I had been boarded on the plane and the doors were closed that the captain came on saying that because of the Middle East crisis, there were limited slots available for takeoff to fly along a very narrow air corridor which was in high demand across the area. Actually, we would be routing south down past Italy, flying over the Adriatic and then flying bordering the Red Sea and then going across Saudi Arabia, which was not the normal route to Doha.
The bad news was that at the time she made the announcement, there was a long queue for us to get up in the air to get a slot to take off with air traffic control. She was saying that she knew that 90% of the passengers on board had ongoing connections within an hour or two of landing and that they were under threat, but they couldn't do anything about them until they were up in the air and they knew more about their ETA and the situation. But to rest assured that Qatar Airways, who we were going to be connecting with in Doha, will be onto it.
So, that was pretty worrying given everything that had happened and you may have read in my previous postings. But the good news was that she came online again after about 45 minutes and said that because we had given the ready signal and everybody was sat down and was ready to go, air traffic control had brought them forwards and that we were about to go, but we still had eight planes in front of us. But it meant that we took off about just over an hour late and we made steady progress throughout the flight, meaning that I landed with about an hour to go until my flight was about to depart.
Nevertheless, it was very, very tight given that I had to get myself through security again for which there was an understandably large queue, given a lot of people being in the same situation, not just in our flight but in others. Then going across the airport to find gate C54, which is where I was leaving from and as I arrived at the gate, the plane was actually already boarding. So, really, really tight, really, really nerve-wracking because I really didn't want to be stranded in Doha because it would have been unlikely that I would have been able to make a flight to connect with this separate itinerary going from Shanghai back to New Zealand.
I am actually speaking this note, which I'll tidy up, in a hotel room at 10 plus six in the morning. I've been up since about 3:10 a.m. I maybe got about four hours sleep, if that, it's just time zones mucking me up. So, I'm just not gonna be able to sleep. I've got about 20 minutes to wait until breakfast opens up at this hotel and then I will go for a little walk, I think, possibly a slightly longer walk than I was going to, and then come back and collect my stuff at the hotel.
And then get myself over to the airport. I need to be there for 11:15 and check in again. It's going to be a slightly more pleasant flight this time around because I do have status, so I will be able to use the lounge and get premium boarding and all the kind of stuff that comes along with that, which I'm grateful for. Fingers crossed that nothing affects my flight's departure time.
I still do have a fairly hard deadline for me to arrive. I mean, I've still got like 36 hours wiggle room, but I'd really, really rather not use it.
Made it to Shanghai