Trip report: BNE-KUL, via Singapore terminal 4

After a frankly chaotic Brisbane International on a Saturday morning (we get the Olympics in eight years! Ha! Just imagine!) - I jump onto QF51 and do the comparatively short eight hour flight to Singapore.

QF51 (on “Swan Valley”) worked as you’d expect it to. It was late to depart (freight taking its time to be loaded). The IFE didn’t work properly for a few people round me (and who knows, me as well, though I don’t use it). Catering was as expected, too, by which I mean that my chicken was unrecognisable as chicken and quite unappetising; while my neighbour’s beef and bacon looked like dog food. I spent much of the flight watching downloaded YouTube videos, featuring variously a man taking apart a few electronic things and working out how they worked, another man explaining how movie film worked, and a man driving through Berkshire and reassuring me that “if you enjoyed the video there’s a button specifically for that”.

It got very bumpy towards Singapore in the late afternoon storms, but we landed almost on time.

Ordinarily I’d fly Malaysian, but this time I’ve unaccountably chosen Jetstar for the leg to Kuala Lumpur. This involves transferral to a new terminal in Singapore airport for me - terminal 4, which is the newest (opened in 2017) and also spent most of the pandemic mothballed and unused. However, to get there from terminal 1 involves a bus.

In London Heathrow, you wait for the bus by standing in an uncomfortable area that has metal tubes as queuing devices, a plastic floor that can be periodically hosed down, and which doesn’t appear to have any air conditioning. In Singapore you wait for it in a fabulously impressive carpeted waiting space, complete with comfy chairs and expensive-looking furniture. The bus is every 20 minutes, but there’s one in three minutes, which I hop onto. We drive for seemingly many miles around the airport and at one point under the runway.

It’s worth it. Terminal 4 is brilliant - airy, large and curvy. Most impressive - with the traditional Changi touches like a fish pond, but also a “cultural” area showing Singaporean buildings (part of which is a surprise as it is revealed to be a disguised video screen with actors).

I’ve no lounge here, but happily go off to find the local 24-hour coffee plus kaya toast plus runny egg store. I assume there is one. And there is. Who needs a lounge when for $8 you can slurp down some half-boiled eggs with soy sauce?

I can also tell you that even the loos are bright and decent, and are even fancy electric ones that have buttons to press to send an uncomfortable jet of water up somewhere it shouldn’t go. I’ve never seen that before in an airport.

Security in Changi Terminal 4 is done as you enter the terminal, to my surprise, rather than the gate-by-gate security of terminal 1. So JetStar boarding is much like anywhere else, boarding by seat row (and my Platinum status counting for nothing). I take my seat in the full plane. “Mr James”, says the FA, giving me (and nobody else) a bottle of water and a mystery muffin. Either she recognises me from my much-lauded appearance on the BBC News channel earlier in the week, or it’s a Qantas Platinum perk. It’s probably the latter.

I watch a downloaded YouTube video of four excitable people looking around bits of Holborn underground station that are not open to the public, and getting very excited about tiles.

I remembered to fill in the Malaysian digital entry form in Brisbane airport; so breezed through immigration; and my bag was about tenth off the plane. I jump into a Grab car, the Malaysian for Uber, and $23.74 gets me a 55 minute ride to the hotel. As I get in, Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car is playing. “Fast roads,” says the driver. And he’s right.

Sometimes, travel is good when it’s smooth. And it was, in this direction.

The way back started smoothly, too. I was on Malaysia Airlines, and I get a WP welcome and a Platinum Phantom next to me on the plane. Malaysia Airlines still has the world’s worst safety video, but nobody noticed that I was wearing noise cancelling earbuds. Life hack.

When I got to Singapore, I enjoyed the new noodles in the QF First lounge, and a rather exciting “dessert cocktail” which involved popping candy.

I go out for a walk in terminal 1, but there’s a lot of building work going on, and I’m struck by the low ceilings and cramped feel of this aging terminal in comparison to terminal 4.

Earlier, at 3.15pm, Qantas texted me to say that QF52 was running 45 minutes late. That message was below a message telling me I had no upgrade (for a previous flight); a message telling me another plane was delayed and a message saying that it had been cancelled. It’s like a small collection of woe. I’m in economy for this flight.

In my experience, if they tell you six hours in advance that the flight is delayed by 45 minutes, they mean it is going to be later than that. And, on arriving to the gate, the tell-tale sign was that the flight crew were waiting there with me. If they’ve not let the flight crew on yet, that was not a good sign.

We’re flying “Margaret River” this evening, which is the one with the iPads instead of the seat back screens (with wifi once we get over Australia; but no power sockets). As I board via the economy door, I’m welcomed - and this is impressive - by an FA looking at my boarding pass (a Malaysian one, with no indication of my status), and instantly saying “welcome back Mr Cridland”, and giving me a glass of champagne to take to my economy seat - where there were a complimentary pair of pyjamas waiting for me, joining the 23,000 at home. Slightly less optimally, the seat next to me is full of a large foreign lady who arrived earlier by wheelchair, who I have to squeeze past. Much less optimally, the main row next to us is entirely composed of young children who are shouting at each other. Even less optimally than the already suboptimal nature of this flight, the lady behind me coughs once every twelve seconds, and continues to do so for seven hours. I avoided one “it’s just a cold and definitely not COVID” person at the conference I was at, and really don’t want to fail at this late stage.

We leave the gate 1 hour 6 minutes late.

I’m offered extra drinks by the FA - three times - but I don’t take him up on it. Nor do I have the meal, which is Singapore-catered: this is my eighth time on this flight, and I think it’s the worst-catered of any of Qantas’s routes, so I now just avoid it. Thank heavens for the lounge.

After a little sleep - the family opposite calmed down, though the coughing from behind me didn’t - we awake for the most lazy of breakfasts, a cardboard pastry in a cardboard box. The inside tastes as if it once had something to do with mushroom. The coffee is - for the first time in a while - entirely undrinkable (it seems to be four times as strong as it should be). I have to give the mostly-filled cup back.

We land 52 minutes late - behind a ton of other flights including the big Air Canada flight from. Vancouver. Qantas hasn’t given me an Express pass, which consigns me to the end of the quarantine exit queue, snaking four times the length of the baggage area and taking more than twenty minutes.

A relatively joyless experience, then, this way - nothing inherently wrong but plenty of irritation. It’s the small things, one on top of another, that add up.