The Geeky Brit

For our flight from Brisbane to Christchurch, New Zealand we took an airline called Jet Star. On our tickets was a Qantas code, but it turned out to be code share flight with Qantas’ discount subsidiary Jet Star. Oh, my what an experience.

I can summarize thus: Avoid at all costs.

Through the airport to the airplane was lovely, a fine send off from the Aussies. But once we got on board the plane, and A320, we started to feel a little bit less special. There were slightly more seats on this plane than on the new A380, the worlds largest passenger plane. Or so it seemed. There was only one class of travel, feral, and not enough to swing a kangaroo rat. The flight was going to be 3.5 hours, and there was going to be no breakfast served. I have come to not expect any food or drinks in the US, but for all our relatively small flights around Oz, we were provided with meals and drinks. Besides this was technically an international flight, so things should be better anyway To be cheap we had planned on just taking advantage of a free breakfast. Ooops. I can normally deal with this, but we had not been told about the fact that this was not a Qantas flight at all.

Then the I began to notice the flight crew, and all my gripes about the lack of food were put aside, and replaced with genuine concern about our safety.

I am going to sound like an old fart here, but my word they seemed young. All were probably under 25, and it showed. They spent the majority of the flight mucking around. During the safety briefing, the attendant nearest to me spent more time trying to pull dance moves at the attendant in the rear. I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.

They were laughing, giggling, and generally being very unprofessional. Listening around the plane, I could tell some of the other passengers were feeling unsafe as well. I could confidently say that “in the event of an emergency”, we could all shimmy, and booty shake our way off the plane, but into some unknown danger the flight crew had missed because they were not paying attention. Like still being at 20,000 feet for example.

Really, it was shocking. I am sure that with both the lack of attention to the passenger’s needs, and the apparent lack of attention to safety procedures are against some FAA regulations. I can only hope that either Qantas or Jet Star read this and take some action.

As you all may figure, I use air travel a lot, and I am still shocked at the experience I had with Jet Star.