One broken down plane and a really irritating American ah pek

I left for the airport Tuesday morning. The journey home was to take me 24 hours, 4 flights, 3 countries and a whole lot of waiting in between.

It's true when people say that when everything goes too smoothly, something is bound to happen. The first 3 flights went perfectly. There were no delays, baggages arrived on time, check-ins were fast. Till i got to London.

The last leg of the journey is from London to Singapore. 12 hours in a cramped place with hundreds of strangers. The minute i stepped onto the plane, it was really really warm. I thought maybe they had the heater on or something. The captain later announces that the tail engine, which supplies the air conditioning is down so there's no air conditioning for the time being and it'd only be on when we are air bourne.

More waiting later, he tells us that the engine is "unservicable". A while later, he says that the gound engineers are bringing in a "standby engine". Then shortly before we were about to take off, he says that the video system's gone wonky and that the crew were going to perform the safety demonstration manually. But somehow it manages to reboot quickly, so we were able to watch it on the personal screens.

The whole waiting process in the plane took a full hour. That's 60 minutes without air conditioning in a small space filled with hundreds of heat-emitting bodies. A poor old man sitting in front of me was getting sick from the heat, coz the steward was bringing him ice cold towels to put on his neck. Some other American ah pek gets irritated and gets out of his seat to go over to an air stewardess and says "it'd be nice if someone would tell us what's going on... blah blah". A while later he calls an air steward over to make the same complaint. Just what we need... Unconstructive blabber.

We finally took off. When the plane was slowly making its climb into the air, a part of the ceiling in the row in front of me where the lights and oxygen masks are falls out and hangs dangerously above the poor old man who was sick earlier. Someone in the row attempts to push it back up. But it doesn't help. An air steward comes over when the seat belt sign goes off and snaps it back into position... but as you can see from the left side, it's still not completely in.

The irritating American ah pek continues to be irritating and terrorizes the poor English uncle who wore Snoopy socks sitting behind him. A couple of times he turns around and glares at the poor English uncle and the second time he says "what are you doing?! stop pushing against the chair, each time you bang against it, you are getting into my space! How would you like it if someone was banging behind you?!" i was thinking give him a break lah, he was only using his laptop and putting up his tray table loh! And it wasn't as if the American ah pek wasn't getting into the poor English uncle's space when he reclined his seat!

Poor English uncle, he must have been repressed the whole 12 hours sitting there, making sure he didn't hit the irritating American ah pek's seat. Coz another time after dinner, he put his tray table up and i guessed it must have hit soooooo hard on the irritating American ah pek's chair to cause him great distress and discomfort that the irritating American ah pek slammed back right into his seat in retailation. Poor repressed English uncle. The second time he used his laptop, he was reduced to really putting it on his lap and not the tray table in case he'd hit the seat again when he put it up and cause a major paralysing back injury to the irritating American ah pek.


Who can blame him man, afterall, Americans rule the world don't they.

The next morning during breakfast, the captain announces something's gone wrong with some catering thing. So some people were going to get their breakfast late. But if it helped, they served the tray first which contained yoghurt and a muffin. Lucky i got mine first, while the rest had to wait for their hot breakfast to be cooked. The hungry passengers only got theirs after i had already finished my hot breakfast, ate my muffin, drank my tea (i would have had time to gulp down the orange juice too if it wasn't that i was too full), and chomped down my yoghurt.

Other than the few hiccups, the rest of the flight(s) went pretty well. Watched 3 movies in 12 hours. Among them... cars. Yah i know... some c gin na again. But it was of sentimental value ok.


At least the inflight entertainment was one thing which didn't break down.