It came in today’s post.
Background: I was on a flight from Sydney to Perth three weeks ago during which the Qantas in-flight entertainment system broke down and the cabin crew couldn’t get it restarted. Qantas has been having quite a bit of trouble on its flights with this sort of thing recently.
Lo and behold - today I get $200 for “the inconvenience that you recently suffered on the flight to Perth”. A very nice gesture to one of its frequent flyers.
Great!!
That’ll get you one tenth of the way to Canada. Now you just need to take nine more flights that break down, and you can come to the next TronnaDope! It’s nice and cool* here just now. 
[sub]*-30C with the wind chill.[/sub]
Qantas was the airline that once ran a contest wherein US travel agents were supposed to re-write the words to popular songs to include Australian things, travel and Qantas Airlines.
I won that contest.
Qantas rocks.
Qantas always seemed to me to be pretty good about the little things.
On a flight from Perth to Sydney, I asked for a can of Swan. Strangely enough, even though we had just left WA, there was no Swan on board. (Note to the unfamiliar: Swan is brewed in Perth, WA.) The flight attendant was very apologetic, and the best she could do was to offer a can of Foster’s. Well, okay. So I started to dig for the money to pay for my beer, and she said, “Oh, no sir. We couldn’t give you a Swan, so this one’s on us.” And the next one was too!
Very nice of them, I think.
Some of the cabin staff also provide lovely favours for folks in need of other sorts of relief I have heard. 
As far as the Fosters goes, normally they can’t even GIVE that shit away. You were probably the butt of some cruel cabin-joke later Spoons. 
I hope you won a trip to Australia, at least…
Spoons, when you were in Australia, did you find that you gradually took on an Australian accent? I was just wondering whether they might have thought you were a local.
That’s just a myth; I don’t believe it for a second.
I was once on a flight from Vancouver to Toronto, with congested ears, experiencing excruciating pain every time the cabin pressure changed… and it was a flight that had to make a stop. In Winnipeg. So there were four episodes of agony. I begged for a pain reliever or a decongestant or something, and the cabin staff were unable to help me. I was never so glad to see the Toronto airport, even in the bad old days when it was overcrowded and looked like ‘the Third World with carpets’…
Of course that was Canada 3000, the Pack-'em-in Airline, where the seats were so close together that my knees touched the back of the seat in front of me, even though I am only 175 cm. When Canada 3000 went bankrupt, I cheered.
Oh, probably. I’d been there long enough and often enough to know that Foster’s wasn’t popular with the locals. Still, I was thirsty for a beer, and if there was no Swan, then Foster’s was close enough. If they laughed at me later, big deal.
Sunspace, no, I retained my usual bland “North American Newscaster” accent at all times. But it wasn’t tourist season, and I had such typically local things as a Transperth Multirider fare card sticking out of my wallet, so I have no idea what the locals thought.
Ah, but that was a movie star. Different rules apply for them than for ordinary slobs like us. 
Dang! Here I’m glad when they haven’t taken all the pillows off the airplane, and the windows aren’t to greasy from people sleeping against them. Think we can get Quantas to replace Northwest Airlines?
I did! A took a ladyfriend with me to Cairns. She was suitably impressed. And grateful. That made me very grateful to Qantas.
Heh. Speaking of accents…I went to an animal park somewhere in the Cairns vicinity, and there were some cockatoos sitting on perches alongside the sidewalk by the entrance. I said hello to one of them, and it said “G’day, mate.” —with an Aussie accent–.
Now, of course it spoke with an Aussie accent, but I hadn’t expected it, and it just seemed so damn cute. Still kind of amuses me.
And Qantas has still never crashed, right? I remember that from Rain Man. Dunno if it’s still true.
Motherfucker. That reminds me, Air Canada still owes me $200 when they cancelled my flight out of Beijing last year! Of course it was in store credit. I hope they haven’t gone bankrupt yet. :smack:
Could you share a bit or two?
Never had a fatality in a commercial flight. They apparently lost some people during WWII when they were flying for the RAAF.
It was about 15 years ago. I don’t remember a single one of them. Sorry.
From the Wikepedia article:
Some were commercial, civilian flights. I think the last, in 1951, was in PNG, with the loss of seven passengers and one crew member.
Qantas’ record is excellent to be sure, but they can be a little tricky. They have never lost a jet plane, but there have been accidents. In 1999 or 2000, when a Qantas 747 overran the runway in at BKK and stopped in a golf course, it cost $100M to repair an aircraft worth about $70M. They paid the $30M extra purely to keep the hull loss count at zero. That particular aircraft has apparently been troublesome ever since.
Interesting - thanks. And I certainly wouldn’t hold WW2 losses against them! It’s to be expected that the Imperial Japanese military wasn’t too concerned with keeping Qantas’s safety record all shiny.
In later stories the hostee openly admits to doing the deed.
That is good of the big Q Cunctator. It’s always nice when something like that comes unexpectedly. It’s not so nice if you have to kick up a stink to get something.
I was on a Qantas flight recently. Two of the flight attendants were a married couple and although not old, they’d obviously been doing the job for a while and enjoyed it. There was supposed to be a charge for alcohol but these two were providing it either free or for a a couple of silver coins. When I asked them about it, they said that they considered their job to be in the service industry, and despite the company removing many of the service aspects, they were determined to do as much as they could for the passengers.
Apparently there is no strict accounting system for the alcohol and other consumables on board.
