Nightstop and recovery flight

Following our emergency landing at Brisbane, immigration was fairly orderly and I received the luggage around 0040, just over an hour after landing.  Considering we landed at an airport which the airline didn’t operate into (and didn’t have their own or contracted staff), things went quite smoothly. Ground staff directed us to wait at Coffee Club outside the arrivals area.

The Chinese man across the aisle from us (with very bad fashion sense) had been sent a driver from the casino to pick him up (the casino did it voluntarily apparently because he was a high roller). But he walked out without picking his luggage up which meant he had quite a task trying to retrieve them. We didn’t feel sorry as he was using his phone through the take-off against the airline’s policy.

It was a long wait for information. At 0200 an announcement came on that our recovery flight would be at around 1800. Ground staff emerged (I guess they had been airside helping people and also organising logistics). They had more or less organised hotels and transport.

First up, they took details of people who wanted to go home or their own accommodation. Then they took names of people who needed hotels. We were allocated to the Grand Chancellor. We waited outside but the transport hadn’t arrived. The queue wasn’t big enough to fill a bus yet and we thought it would be quite a while before we would get moving. So we opted to go in a taxi which cost us about AUD68 (ouch but worth it when tired).  We were checked-in and tucked up in bed at 0300.

Waking up around 0830, we learned that our flight had apparently suffered a bird strike. Remains of birds were found at Gold Coast airport. That puzzled me a little as I didn’t think the bangs were heard on the runway and expected the birds to have been shredded and cooked by the Rolls Royce engines. There had been 345 passengers and 14 crew on our flight (I noticed 3 captains in the departure lounge).

I already had an email timed at 0400 advising of our recover flight with an ETD of 1810. Pretty impressive that they had sorted it out within 4 hours of the emergency landing!

We had breakfast at the hotel. The airline had allowed AUD20pp for Continental but the breakfast was AUD24 at the hotel, so we had to top-up AUD4pp.

After some admin on the computer, we headed out for a walk into the city. It was a lovely day but once in the sun, I actually sweated a little. And this is winter! Brisbane must be hell in summer!

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After a brief rest and a wash, we grabbed lunch downstairs. The airline had allowed AUD25 but we had trouble spending anything near that amount as the hotel’s lunch prices were very reasonable.

Pickup was 1400. We reached the airport around 1420 and were first in the queue. It seemed like quite an exercise setting up for check-in. Since AirAsia X didn’t operate into Brisbane, they had to bring their Gold Coast handling agents here along with their laptops. They seemed to be working quite hard trying to get sytems sorted and coordinating between Gold Coast and Brisbane ground handlers.

By the time check-in started around 1500, the queue had built right up from additional bus loads.  We were very lucky to be served quickly being in Flatbed class.  Being amongst the first, we had dot-matrix printed make-shift boarding passes on plain paper. And that took quite a while to process. Hopefully the pace picked up; I did notice people who standard boarding passes later.

Once airside, we relaxed at the very nice Plaza Premium lounge overlooking the apron. Our aircraft landed around 1630. It looked brand new and when I searched on google, it showed up as only 1 year old (9M-XBB). Yesterday’s ill-fated Xincillating PhoeniX (9M-XXT) wasn’t much older at 3 years.

We headed to the gate around 1720 for an 1810 departure. Ground staff weren’t at the gate but the crew were there waiting to get on the flight. Presumably ground staff were still landside checking people in.

We closed up for departure around 19:45 after sitting on board for a while following manual headcounts. I suppose with makeshift boarding passes, they had to take extra care to make sure the numbers were right. From the headcount we appear to have lost about 50 passengers since last night.

I noticed that the same purser from last night dispensed with the add-on about “World’s Best Low Cost Airline for 9 years running”.  Some people wouldn’t have been impressed with that but I think the airline did pretty well.

As with the previous flight, we got our meals within 10 minutes of take off. I took a sleeping pill at 20:45 and slept like a baby till 0200 then a little more till 0300. Then I kept my eyes closed till just before 0400 before we landed at 0415 (0215 Kuala Lumpur time). Great having a flatbed!