Kingsford Smith Airport, Mascot (Shep's Mound Lookout), NSW, Australia
Here we see a rear view of Qantas A380-842 VH-OQD (alias Fergus McMaster) which I described in an earlier shot, taxiing to the terminal after landing as QF12 from LAX to Sydney.
As I mentioned earlier, I blame this hunk of junk for trashing a big part of our stay in London in 2019. Although truthfully my bigger grievance is with what I consider to be one of the most successful con jobs in commercial history, the Qantas Frequent Flyer program. The program where you are used as a dupe to generate huge amounts of cash for Qantas (by shaving amounts off your purchases and harvesting marketing data about you for YEARS), charging higher fares to even entitle you to ASK for an upgrade, then, when the time comes, finding out that "{shrug}, sorry-not-sorry, we don't have anything for you". That left a sour taste in my mouth for that flight to begin with, but truth be told losing an entire day in London, an entire night's stay there, and leaving us in Singapore was way worse and that was down to the mechanical unreliability of... THAT thing.
I suppose some might argue that an unexpected 24 hour stay in Singapore was a bonus, an adventure to be had! OK, but let's get real here. The plane landed in the middle of the night for what was supposed to be a 50 minute stopover after a 6 hour flight from Sydney which had itself been scheduled to leave (a) late in the afternoon and (b) was delayed by several hours, so at best, we'd been up for something like 18 to 20 hours by that point. We had no toiletries because of the prohibition on liquids in hand luggage. We couldn't leave Changi even if we wanted to because the crew spent the next several hours trying to restart the plane without the smoke alarms going off, so at BEST we managed a couple of hours of dozing on the floor in the airport terminal. (Also, you can't just wander out into a foreign country for which you have no visa or visa waiver just because your plane is delayed.) By the time they gave up and shuttled us off to a hotel the following morning we had been up for well over 24 hours aside from whatever naps we had grabbed, un-showered, in my case unshaven, and tired beyond the speaking of it. We (and 400-odd others from the plane, except maybe for some whose age was under 25) were in NO condition to go and do an improvised visit to Singapore, a place that we had not done any research on and knew relatively little about in terms of sightseeing specifics. In the afternoon we wandered the streets of our neighbourhood for a couple of hours. Am I sorry that I got to see even a small part of Singapore? No, not at all. But knowing the value of time, we didn't get very much out of it... yet we lost a LOT of time usage in London. So the "It's an adventure" thing? That doesn't wash. It's just as unwashed as we were after 24 hours of travel frustration.
Despite being a Qantas shareholder, the only reason that I would fly Qantas by choice again would be if I DO find a way to use those hundreds of thousands of Frequent Flyer points that I've accumulated or if other airlines were a worse option.
Or, possibly, if Qantas gets a new CEO who realises that hacking off employees (because they might be uuuuuunionists!), customers, suppliers and pretty much everyone else is not a recipe for long term success. Not that it matters to people like that because they are certain to GET their obscene bonuses for "efficiency improvements". (Like cutting maintenance services which may or may not (but probably does) have a connection with whether smoke detectors work properly in an A380.) By the time the results of their policies hit the fan, they're long gone with millions in the bank, board seats at other companies (having been inducted into that self-selecting and self-serving clique known as "the public company directors' club"), and being paid thousands for speaking engagements at which they talk about their "inspirational leadership".
So yes, I'm quite glad to see the back of Qantas in general, and this plane in particular.
-----
Edit June 2025: Of course those aren't the only reasons why #QantasSucks; illegally sacking about 1700 staff during the pandemic, selling tickets on flights that they had already decided to cancel, serving gross, radioactive looking slop as meals, spending hours on the phone if you ever need to contact them... a bunch of reasons. Thankfully the first two of those caught up with Joyce eventually after his enforced early "retirement" in late 2023. His name is like plutonium to a very significant chunk of people who have been on the "shafted" end of Qantas over the last few years, so even the insular clique that is the public company directors' club won't touch him at this point; were he appointed to any public company boards at this stage the backlash against the chairperson would be huge. While "The Club" takes care of its own, that is secondary to the higher duty of taking care of themselves. I'm sure given enough time his image will be rehabilitated but for now, I do love me a bit of schadenfreude. Or would, if he hadn't sucked millions out of the company before he left.
