Boarding is called. For the first time that I can recall my habit of boarding late on Qantas (or Air NZ for that matter) and still having plenty of room for my carry on fails - my bag ends up several rows behind me
I don't think it is due to excessive amounts of carry ons, but rather the combined effect of full flight, some Qantas stuff in the overhead bins (eg magazines which were conspicuously not offered to passengers) and the old trick by regular flyers of putting the carry on slightly ahead of your seat to make it easier to get out on deplaning.
As we boarded we were handed Australia arrival cards. A good idea I thought as it saves the FA doing a run through the cabin mid flight. I'm in the same seat on the same aircraft I flew recently - but with the small fleet that isn't surprising. The flight is full.
We are offered pre departure drink - water, orange juice or "champagne" (really sparkling wine). There is a delay apparently caused by a passenger losing their passport between immigration and the gate thus a search is made and then checked bags are offloaded. I fire off a message that I'm running slightly later than planned for my meeting but should be close to on time.
On the way to the runway I see the international terminal is, as usual these days, rather busy with all gates in use as well as several remote stands. Indeed as we roll back past the terminal on taking off I notice our gate is already filled by an Air New Zealand 747.
We have nice views for a few minutes until disappearing above the clouds over the Tasman Sea. Once we are out of the initial turbulence service starts. First a drink together with either nuts (cold) or olives (see
why can't QF serve my nuts in a warm bowl?). Then personal DVDs are handed out. The menu is missing so I have to go through the folder checking each DVD. Also missing is the duty free catalogue, but then they cannot do duty free today for the payment machine is missing or broken.
As has been the case lately, the curtain is not up. This means a constant stream of economy passengers traipsing past to use the forward toilet and disrupts the service (thus taking much longer to do)
According to QF FAs who post on FT [find link and put here] the curtain was taken down (by some crew against the rules) to save them having to hand out DVDs to the first row of economy passengers (who cannot see an overhead screen when the curtain is up).
Meal is light dinner - menu to follow.
I doze a bit without getting much sleep. There are limited views on arrival to Melbourne with a reasonable amount of cloud. With my bag so many rows behind me I am quick to get up (once the seatbelt sign is extinguished) to retrieve it before the aisle gets too crowded. There is a short delay since the airbridge is unmanned
Then off, down the corridor, up to transit, rescreened at an empty screening point (again avoiding eye contact of the officers doing explosives checks), through 2 duty free shops (as with most Australia international terminals it is difficult to avoid walking through duty free due to the way it is set up) and up to the Qantas first class lounge.