Flight to Singapore

I’m not too sure if Thursday was a really short day or a really long day. I got up on Thursday morning and didn’t lay down to sleep until what was Saturday morning. Getting up Thursday, I got to the airport in Calgary all fine, and it looked a little colder than it is now in Singapore.

The flight to LAX was pretty good and despite being a half-hour late in departing, was fairly uneventful until getting closer to landing. I was in an aisle seat, but am still kicking myself for having my camera packed away in the overhead bin. As we were over the ocean coming down to land, looking way down there was another airplane landing on the left runway (we were going for the right). It started that we were about 3,000 ft above them and then just kept descending and descending and descending, until we were level with them, then landed in tandem. Also when we were on the runway and taxiway I got the best view of my Singapore Airlines A380 that I would be flying next.

With the delay, I was in quite a rush to pick up my luggage and change terminals and check in, but it all managed to work out. After clearing security I kept trying to find a good spot to get a picture of the airplane at the gate, but there was nothing that worked well at all. My best was a window that I had to reach as high as I could and hope for the best…

The 12 hour flight to Tokyo was pretty good, although we were late getting out of Los Angeles. They were doing some taxiway construction, so the aircraft’s engines didn’t get started, we were towed (very slowly) by the pushback tractor, and had police car escorts through the construction area since the wings overhung into it. It took about half an hour, and then had to wait another 20 minutes to take off. Taking off in the A380 was interesting as it uses up a LOT of runway to get airborne, but doesn’t feel as fast as in other aircraft. I was on the upper deck in a window seat which was really nice. There is a little cubby against the window to put a bunch of your stuff, but unfortunately all the stuff I put in there I didn’t use (laptop, camera, book, etc.). I got a few hours of sleep and watched Cowboys and Aliens (good), Green Lantern (not so good), and a bunch of episodes of Big Bang Theory, Family Guy, and played some Bookworm.

We were dealing with some very heavy headwinds (150km/hr) so were a bit further delayed a bit more. It was raining with very low cloud in Tokyo while we were landing, so I didn’t get to see much of anything.

However, I did get a better picture of the airplane.

Since we were a bit late, there was only a couple small shops open, but if felt good to walk around for a bit. Again we were a bit delayed boarding the aircraft, found out after the fact that the strong headwinds had crashed one of the flight computers and they had to do a full power off and restart of the entire plane. The 7  hour flight from Tokyo to Singapore was a lot more rough with about half of it with the seatbelt sign on. I got some sleep, and watched Columbiana (good) and played some more Bookworm. One of the nice things about the A380 is the staircase between the economy sections on the main floor and upper deck; it seems to get the legs working and blood flowing a little better than just walking up and down the aisle.

From there it was landing in Singapore, grabbing some Duty Free (alcohol is ridiculously expensive here), picked up my luggage, cleared customs and met up with Andrew.