Easy… arrive 5 hours after the plane takes off on New Years Eve… in Sydney… bound for London with no flights going out :). That’s what I did, oops. My family, who were with me were not that happy, but the consolation was we saw the fireworks on Sydney Harbour Bridge.

How did it happen ? An SMS was sent from the carrier (Singapore Air) telling me the flight time had changed, what it didn’t tell me was that this was the connecting flight from Singapore to London, and I didn’t check. Perhaps they should think through their UX a bit more and the impact of a small screen on the information they are trying to deliver. I will check next time.

What happened next? Well I was expecting a complete nightmare, but although this was entirely my fault (so I had no right to rant, and didn’t), and there were no seats available until 12 days later, a very nice bloke at the Sydney Singapore Air office (Davin he said his name was) got us all onto a flight 24 hours later, and we didn’t have to wait on standby at the airport. I guess some lucky person got bumped up to business to make space for us. 24 hours later, having done some work, watched a few movies and one embedded Linux reboot from the onboard video system (A380’s have 1 CPU with a full IP stack and Ethernet port per seat running a Linux kerne and every seat has 110v, if only I had a network cable) we arrived in London, tired, cold but very grateful to Singapore Air. The only shock was the temperature difference. 30C.