Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Buxton Bound: First leg (23/7/13)

Living on the most sparsely populated continent on the planet can sometimes be inconvenient, but occasionally it means riding a sparsely populated plane - and that's quite the opposite.

We have one stopover between Melbourne and Dubai, which happens to be Kuala Lupmur, famous for its brand new airport that people are saying Sydney should imitate (if they can ever decide where to put it). (On a completely parenthetical note, I'm typing this up in SciTE and it uses syntax highlighting by default. So it bolded the "if" on that last clause - which I think strangely appropriate.) So anyway, we're stopping over - which gives Emirates the chance to cram more pax on board. But if you look at that the other way, it means we have a plane flying half empty, which means just about everyone can have a complete row of seats to themselves!

I initially tried just leaning my seat back, taking advantage of the fact that the seat behind me is empty. I didn't sleep much. So I tried applying what I learned on that horrible XPT trip ages ago - for a wink of sleep, lie on the floor. It worked well for a bit - the floor was quite comfy (carpeted, warmish, and I could steal all the KUL pax's pillows to fill up the dents in my body) and the slight vibration wasn't all that distracting. But then a hostess told me it was against safety regs so she moved me to an even less populated part of the plane. She even found a middle section (four seats abreast) which fitted me exactly! Nobody seems to worry about feet on seats somehow, which makes everything more pleasant.

This, folks, is why we have wide body jets. 3+3 in a 737NG is great for daytime flights when everyone wants to be within a bull's roar of a window, but when it's dark outside there's no substitute for a bit of business-class-for-the-price-of-economy-at-least-as-far-as-the-first-stopover comfort.

Must remember that about long flights - direct is convenient, but stopovers have their advantages.

We're almost over the equator at the moment. Breakfast has just been cleared away and we're just under an hour away from KL.

1 comment:

Talldad said...

Lumpur not Lupmur?