Shit happens and tbf I would rather airlines erred on the side of caution when it came to the safety of their aircraft, it is very easy to forget that until very recently a flight crashing cos of bad weather or technical failure was a fairly common event, today it is vanishingly rare, luckily.
Lost baggage; when you think about how baggage that doesn't get lost makes it through the system, your mind gets blown. Plus I get dibs on Emirates baggage that never finds an owner
The fuel thing, yeah, airlines in trouble often do this, the fuel companies and the airlines should sort it out and never take it out on the passengers, you can bet their London-Sydney flight wasn't affected...
Have a look on Flight Radar at just how many flights are buzzing around, each one with hundreds of passengers who have all booked, changed their dates, times, names etc., right up to the last minute, each flight having up to four classes, each with up to 300 fare types...just imagine the systems needed to keep that shit flowing. It's pretty epic. And you get ill-educated dicks like moi having access to this. Madness.
No, listen I completely agree about the amazingness of it all. To illustrate that I'll bore you quickly with the lost luggage story in full.
It was the first time we went around the world, meaning we'd already had 9 or 10 flights to/from and around S America. Lan Peru, what a great airline (well, it was then, but they had just had a whole new fleet of shiny planes). Coming to Australia absolutely nothing has gone wrong and we'd spent nearly six months travelling around what most people would see as developing countries. Even to this day, after dozens and dozens of flights I've never had my luggage lost.
But what I described above kind of happened in reverse. In that the fuel thing at Cairns happened, which delayed us to Sydney and we supposedly only had a 2 hour window going on to Bangkok. We were assured on the plane that the BK flight would wait for us.
Hohoho. Boy did it wait. As soon as we arrived at Sydney we saw the 'your flight is fucked' signs everywhere. We were told to get our bags to put them on the flight but then we'd be put up in a hotel first while they fixed the plane. And that's where the fun really began. In Cairns, Barrier Reef, my gf had dived for the first time and in her bag was her prize possession, underwater photo with her and a turtle. When we went to get our, fairly identical, rucksacks off the Cairns flight only one was there. And of course it was mine. She didn't take it well.
Hotel was swanky, free food etc, and she never enjoyed anything because of fretting about her bag (more to the point, that photo). We were woken at 4am next day to get on the plane to BK. And it was only because, by luck, she met a bloke on the coach to the airport who had also had his bag lost, and decided to be proactive about it, that she got hers back. They were taken to the lost luggage bit at Sydney, where, to illustrate your point, there was a huge mountain of bags, and told 'find your bag'. His was lurid and he found it in a couple of minutes. Hers was, like a lot of the others, blue. And it took her the best part of 20 minutes.
Even then, she wasn't allowed to grab it. Instead someone took it off to the plane, assuring her she'd get it in BK. So, 8 hours later when we arrived...of course it wasn't on the carousel. Mine was. After a further period of fretting we walked around the carousel, as you do, and noticed a bag, her rucksack, dumped on the floor about 10 metres away...with a stern, armed Thai policeman standing over it. To this day, fuck knows what that was about. He just went "Your?", kicked it at us, and walked off.
So yeah, amazed more doesn't go missing, although at Sydney we saw the amount that does. Really huge mountain. And having flown loads of different airlines I can't think of a single one besides Qantas I'd moan about. Haha, except American Airlines cabin crew. Yeah, you could tell they were from New York.
I'm going to my 'other ' balcony to watch the view
