Our flight to Auckland with ETA of 0030 on Saturday 03 August, closed up 20 minutes ahead of schedule but couldn’t push back till a few minutes ahead of scheduled time. Another aircraft next door beat us to the pushback and took up the available space.
I was lucky to have received my paid upgrade in Premium Economy with Kim, but he got further upgraded to Business Premier just before the door closed. Surprisingly the Boeing 777-200 seats by the engine were very noisy at cruise, more so than on our previous flight earlier where we had been seated further back near the trailing edge of the wing. I find some aircraft quiet by the engines as if the noise goes backwards.
Kim and I swapped seats after takeoff so that I could sleep flat whereas he had other arrangements with crew he knew.
I reckon Buenos Aires has the best caterers on Air New Zealand’s network. Their seared beef served with a blue cheese risotto was awesome. I remember another time when another melt-in-the-mouth steak came with chimichurri sauce. And that’s coming from Kim and I who don’t actually appreciate meat and steaks in particular.
Air New Zealand’s inflight wifi worked well on the mobile phone. It’s a free service; they started off charging a lot for it, then did a promo pricing and before offering it for free possibly after realising that no one wanted to pay. They even allow low-res streaming on Youtube. I didn’t try anything on the computer. The service did stop late in the flight possibly due to lack of coverage close to Antarctica.
I tried to sleep horizontally for an hour without much success. With the aid of a pill I had four good hours followed by another hour of light sleep. Six hours horizontally is pretty good for me. We killed some time chatting in the galley before I did some financial admin on my laptop, and enjoying breakfast before landing at 0500 a day later on Sunday 4 August 2019.
Auckland has had a cold wet snap and the misery is meant to continue for a couple of days. Apparently this is the first one of the season, with a largely mild winter so far. It will be a shock to the system after having over two months of warm weather.