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Published: December 15th 2014
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Ever since I was a tiny lad I have loved planes, nearly to the point of obsession. Every time we drive along the Southern motorway / parking lot near Manukau I am on the look-out for planes taking off and landing. Heather finds it odd that I can identify a type of plane from a reasonable distance (eg A320, 777 etc). Luckily for me Zachary also loves planes so that has been a good excuse to go to the airport a number of times to look at the planes. I imagine his head will spin when he sees the sheer number or planes at Dubai and Gatwick and Heathrow in particular!
There are a
lot of airlines out there and I tend to stick to ones I know and have had a good experience with – hence the choice to go
Emirates (who code-share with Qantas so I can cope if we end up on a different airline) – and my refusal to consider Thai (the fact they go through a complete shit-hole of a country disqualifies them also). Singapore Airlines was an option but Heather had no desire to go to Singapore again, and as previously blogged,
we decided against going via the USA which would have seen us flying Air NZ to the US and then Lufthansa from there. Going via China was cheap but had little appeal, although China Southern seems to be a good airline, and I didn't even bother suggesting we go through North Korea...
A good website to check out airlines and their quality (or lack of) is
http://www.airlinequality.com/Airlines/AirlineA-Z.htm It has “official” ratings as well as lots of customer reviews.
When I went to Sydney to visit my friend Alex last year I took the opportunity to fly on the Emirates A380 aircraft – this is an extraordinary feat of modern engineering. There are villages smaller than this plane! When the Wright brothers made that first flight just 111 years ago, they surely could not have in their wildest dreams imagined this.
From NZ
So our first flight will be on an Emirates A380 from Auckland to Dubai on Flight 35, stopping at Brisbane. The first stretch is about three and a half hours. By the time we have had a meal and explored the in-flight entertainment it will be time to
land! The next leg will be the challenge. After an hour and a half stop it is a marathon
14 and a half hours to Dubai– one of the longest commercial flights in the world. With a bit of luck it won’t be full (seating capacity is around 500) and we’ll have some room to stretch out. I feel this would be an ideal time for Zachary to have a 10 hour sleep.
From Dubai we fly to
London on
Emirates Flight 1. The advantage of stopping in Dubai, rather than Singapore, is that we have a relatively short flight on an A380 to Europe, although convincing Zachary that another
8 hour flight is a good idea may be a hard sell. However we will have had 3 full days in Dubai so hopefully we will all be reasonably rested. Onto the Continent
After 3 days in London our next flight is
2 and a half hours to Rome on
British Airways Flight 2540, this time on another Airbus – an A319. As you might guess this is a slightly shortened-fuselage version of
the A320 which is in common use in this part of the world. It only has a capacity of 124 so it is probably going to be quite full.
A short
1.5 hour flight is next from Ljubljana to Zurich flying
Swiss International Air Lines Flight 2277. The airline only operates two type of planes, Avro RJ and Embraer 145. The former is British made and seats around 100 and the other is Brazilian and seats only around 50 (the seating configuration on these planes is 2 and 1)
Into the Arctic and then East
Our next flight is
1.5 hours from Copenhagen to Helsinki on the familiar Airbus A320 on
Finnair Flight 666 (!). The next day it is
2 hours to Kittila on an Embraer 190 which seats 100 on British budget airline
Flybe. There is a stop at Ivalo – so it is 1.5 hours and then half an hour. Same airline and plane on the way back a week later, but non-stop this time and the much less ominous flight number of 557.
Our next internal flight is
1 hour 20 minutes from Riga in Lativa to Warsaw. As you can imagine there are not a massive amount of airline options here either and we are flying on
LOT Polish Airlines Flight 784 on another Embraer, this time the 170 which, unsurprisingly is bigger than the 145 and smaller than the 190, seating about 80.
Our last booked internal flight is from
Prague to Istanbul. Our agent originally booked us on Ukraine International Airlines with a stop in Kiev. Nothing in that last sentence should fill anyone with any confidence so we asked for an alternative. So instead we are flying with
Tarom which is the main airline of Romania. This has overwhelmingly good reviews on the web site I mentioned earlier so I am optimistic. First it is
2 hours to Bucharest on Flight 226 on a Boeing 737-700. These remain popular planes although they have been supplanted by the A320 for short-haul flights. We have four hours to twiddle our thumbs in Bucharest so with a bit of luck we can get into the city, before carrying on on Flight 263 to Istanbul. This is only
1 hour 15 minutes and is on an Airbus 318. Not surprisingly it is a bit smaller than the aforementioned A319 and carries 132 passengers.
Getting Home
On the way back we are booked from London via Dubai and Melbourne, again all on Emirates A380s but as stated in the first blog, we will more than likely try to fly from somewhere closer to Turkey to Dubai.
As well as planes of course we will be doing a lot of train and also some bus travel and to get from Helsinki, Finland, to Tallinn, Estonia, we will catch a ferry. What are the odds of our luggage arriving in the same place as us every time?
Ed
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