Well, made it back to the secret stopping-off location. Melbourne Airport is a joke where public transport is concerned!
The 2 times I arrived there I used the Skybus service. This is a bus service that stops outside each of the arrivals areas and gies direct to Southern Cross station; and charge you AUD16 for it (or AUD26 for a return journey). Since I needed to use trams on the last day I decided to get back to the airport by public transport. Just under AUD11 fir the 1-day pass which covers all buses, trains and trams. The problem is the Melbourne doesn't have a train station, so you have to catch a bus from the nearest train station. This part is fairly easy... The problem is that the bus stop at the airport is a good 10 minutes walk to international departures! This really isn't good enough for an international airport!
Interesting first flight. we got pushed back, engines started and then just sat there. Eventually the pilot told us they had decided to change the active runway direction, so they had to redo some calculations before we could taxi.
He'd also mentioned that we may get dome turbulence about 6 hours into the flight. Unfortunately, he was right. Nothing too major, except for a few bits where we were flying through cloud at 36,000 feet. The problem was we kept having patches of turbulence followed by a buy of smooth flight; but they ended up keeping the seatbelt signs on a good 5 hours or so!
Finally, the approach and landing. Given the number of flights I've done in the past few years, the fact I tend to sit at the back of the wing so I can see what we're doing, and my playing around on Microsoft's FlightSim software, I know what to expect. Watching the speed and altitude on the screen I couldn't help but feel we were approaching on the fast side, and we were getting to the final approach yet there was no sign of the flaps being extended. In the end we suddenly appeared to have a full flap extension at the same time as the landing gear was being lowered. Normally the flaps are almost gully extended by that point; the final level being deployed with the landing gear. It also ended up being the worst landing I've had on an Airbus - until now I've always had pretty smooth landings in the Airbus range of aircraft. Now I'm no expert in flight... These are just personal observations based on the 30+ flights I think I've done in the last 2 years alone. Perhaps someone out there with more knowledge can explain what may have been going on to lead to such an unusual approach/landing. Anyway, now just killing the 7 hours till my flight back to the Secret Location.
And this was posted at 7am local time. No idea what time appear on the blog as I've not reset the timezone on the iPod yet!