Not as bored at Sam obviously was, but here's my short story...
I was coming back from Frankfurt via Honk Kong to Sydney in January. The first leg was boring, it was a Cathay 777, great FA's, crap inflight entertainment and good food
We landed in HKG, and we had an two hours to go and get something to eat and go to the toilet etc.
Off we went to whatever gate number it was, and there sat an almost miniature QANTAS Boeing 767-338 compared to everything else around it. And true to form, QANTAS served up a cracker. A 9 hour flight (ended up a lot longer) with NO INFLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
. With all of it's 229 seats, it felt like we were sitting on a minibus. But surprisingly, it was a lot more comfortable than the newly designed Cathay seats. But before we could take off, they needed an hour to fix the left engine. As the captain said "We have a very minor problem folks, the left engine won't start, but we should be in the air soon". Very minor. Anyway, they got it started, and we were off to Sydney.
When we got up to cruising altitude, they started serving out breakfast (the second one I'd been offered in 3 hours
), and we continued on our merry way. I fell asleep for a little bit. I woke up to a scene of chaos.
I had just gotten up, and the guy in the row behind us had a Heart Attack/Stroke. This was about 2 hours out from Darwin. His condition was getting slowly worse, but luckily for QANTAS, there was a trained nurse on board. The FA's were excellent, a true credit to QANTAS. They remained calm and dealt as best as they could with limited resources. So the decision was made by the FA's and the Pilots and Ground Staff, that they needed to land the plane in Darwin. It made for good (yet very unfortunate) entertainment (not saying I enjoyed it, but just heaps of action).
So in we came to Darwin, the guy was slowly walked off the plane in a wheelchair (he didn't look alive to me and my Mum told me he probably wasn't gonna make it-she was the trained nurse).
So, we went to take off, and guess what happens: "Sorry folks, it looks like our minor problem that we encountered in Honk Kong has come back, and we will need Ground staff to take a proper look at the Left engine. We had already sat there an hour for the poor guy, and now we had to wait 2 hours for QANTAS to fix that Left engine.
So, we took off once again, and it was a race against time to get to Sydney before the curfew kicked in...
And sadly, we didn't make it
So, just to make our holiday last a little longer, it was us and the other 227 passengers off to Melbourne. We stayed a night out at the airport, then finally, a total of 25 hours later got to Sydney airport.
And that 25 hours was just from Hong Kong.
That was one long flight...