Australia is a long way from anywhere

[Maz066]

My daughter and family from Surrey have been over staying with us in Aus. It has been quite warm and a typical Aus Christmas with temps around 35. They went home yesterday. They were due to fly out at 16:40 with Edihad. After two weeks of great weather we got a severe thunderstorm which closed the airport.
They were 7 hours on the aircraft waiting on the tarmac before they finally took off at 23:00 and are now faced with a 13 hour flight to Abu Dhabi then another 10 or so to Heathrow
Bring back Concord

[Walkingthedog]

Wouldn’t have been much quicker. Concorde didn’t have a huge range so would have had to stop more frequently and wouldn't have been able to fly supersonic for most of the flight.

7 hours on the tarmac. That must have been one hell of a storm.

[brian1951]

Ah Concorde so were the days, took me longer to get from Heathrow back to shropshire than it did to fly on Concorde from New York, happy days.

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

Tell me about it - I remember my first ever flight OS to the ME. It was the fact that it was about 6 hours just to actually cross the Australian coast on the trip from Melbourne to Singapore that woke me up to the fact how big Australia is and how far Australia is from Europe and the ME. Fortunately Melbourne Tullamarine is a proper international airport so no flights to another place to catch a plane OS.

When I was doing archaeological survey work up in far north west Queensland, the first trip the company I worked for sent me on a 2 hour flight from Melbourne to Brisbane followed by a 2 and 1/2 hour flight from Brisbane to Mt Isa then about a 1 and 1/2 hour flight in a Cessna to where I was based. They then expected me to start work when I got there. That wasn't counting the waiting times between flights. After the first trip I told the company that I was going to take an afternoon flight to Brisbane, overnight there, then fly to Mt Isa and then fly on to the camp I was working out of.

It was better than arriving in far NW Queensland in the pre wet season heat thoroughly jet lagged after leaving cool Melbourne at the crack of dawn.