Its now coming up on 11am here in Melbourne. QF8093 (to avoid confusion with the real QF93 for today) is supposed to be departing at 11.30 for Sydney. Given that the load on the flight is around 90%, I estimate that we won't be out of here until 12.00 at the earliest.

Some more joy - we all have to deplane at SYD and go through gate security for hand luggage inspection - the TSA in the US won't give us an exemption to avoid having to do this. We still have to refuel, recater and swap crews.

The flight crew for our original flight has been down in the lounge showing the flag; clearly they arent to blame and the pilot said by all means start writing the letters to Customer Relations.

Scheduled time of departure is 2.00pm SYD time arriving at 8.00am LAX. My connection on LA601 through to Lima at 12.30pm could be a bit shaky, nearly as shaky as I feel having been up for the better part of 30 hours.

Just heard an ad for the 16,000 point anz promotion - "you can even use the points as a start to going somewhere else" - sounds like a good idea in theory, just use the points on CX instead which would probably recover from this kind of incident a bit quicker. I mean its not like we are at a far flung end point destination like Mumbai or Johannesburg, but seriously, Melbourne?

Any suggestions as to an appropriate amount of compensation for this kind of experience? We would have been a LOT happier if the flight had been cancelled outright at say 6pm yesterday and would operate at say 12.00pm today. We could have just spent the time in the hotel or tried to make other arrangements. The whole getting up at 3am to attempt something that QF senior management knew wouldnt work (beating the curfew at LAX - despite Qantas saying they'd pay whatever it takes ) was just lunacy and has definitely burnt hundreds of thousands of dollars in their own costs as well as a similar amount of goodwill.

Just been advised that we will board in 20 minutes (they're just finishing cleaning and catering, blah de blah) so things are looking up. I suggested to the pilot that the Dom should be flowing on both sides of the curtain on this trip!