Dying silver swan

After a quibble with Qantas who arbitrarily cancelled our long-scheduled flight then neglected to bother notifying us of any flight change (luckily, we came across it, double-checking online) we eventually headed for the States a day earlier than planned.

Online checkin was dysfunctional for the flight. Seating was non-negotiable. Staff were thin-lipped. The craft was a Longreach. The seats, on that leg of 13 hours, were ones that Qantas Health and Safety Inspectors might have informed unwary passengers that they came with a Health Hazard Warning: narrow at the sides, short in the seat, swaybacked, zero leg room, neck rest adjustable only to a height of a tall person's mid-shoulder blades. Uncomfortable. And, worse still: dangerous.

In a crisis, passengers crushed into these seats would be hard pressed to unravel, let alone attempt to assist any person needing emergency assistance of any sort. And window passengers are, quite simply, death-trapped. Their only option in times of need is to clamber over prostrate bodies tiptoeing precariously using narrow armrests as footholds.  Appalling, really. 

Qantas needs to lift its seating game or it will end up in a cantankerous class action legal suit from the bulk of its client group, who board their planes physically healthy, but alight with brutalized knees from being bashed by the steel frames of recliner seats in front of them, painful spines needing post-flight physiotherapy given the badly-angled seating positions they are forced to assume, and twisted and knotted muscles from being constrained in such restrictive spaces with literally no room at all to manoeuvre.

I spoke with several tall passengers when we landed at Los Angeles, wondering how they flew. "Unbearable!" growled a lean long man unwinding himself, snail-like, from a smaller-than-standard seat at the side and rear of the plane, fit only for infants. "Qantas never used to be like this!" a foreign frequent flyer grumbled. "They're just cramming more seats into more planes trying to make more profit and to hell with the passengers."

Embarrassing, too, that the Frontier domestic seats that took us deeper into US territory were in lush and luxurious comfort in comparison, putting Qantas international seats deeper in the shade.

"Shame, Qantas, shame!" could become the new catchcry from international travellers who need to stamp hard with their exiting feet any plane, like the Qantas Longreach, until it becomes what it deserves to be--a cube of battered scrap metal fit purely for recycling. Such a beautiful bird Qantas once was. Such a shame to witness its dying swan act now.

One of our trip group shots

 Flying kangaroo

Another our trip group shots