What a night... My partner was travelling from BNE-SYD on the last JQ flight of the evening. It departed BNE very late and was due to touch down at about 10:55, so had about 5 minutes to play with before curfew kicked in.
I drove out to the airport at about 10:30 and even my poor British car was struggling with the fog! I had the ATC ap running on my iPhone and heard JQ819 conduct a missed approach just before curfew. From memory, a VA from Brisbane and a JQ from AVV did the same. QF from BNE (shame on us for not forking out the extra!) just made it in by total fluke by the sound of it. An EK from DXB also went around and didn't return.
Not knowing what was going on, I drove home and called Jetstar. What a mistake that was! It took 10 minutes to explain to the idiot what I wanted to know. He then proceeded to tell me that he'd called "Jetstar Operations" at Mascot and the plane was definitely landing at 10:50. He even told me he swore his job on it. It was 11:45 at the time (I guess the time change between MNL and SYD is a bit hard to calculate!). After 45 minutes on the phone, and after flight aware made it pretty clear that the flight was diverting to ADL, the supervisor finally admitted that his staff member had straight out lied to me, never called SYD and that the flight was now headed for ADL. He had no idea when it was due to arrive, where the passengers were staying or when they would be departing for SYD the next day. I did learn from this experience that JQ have certainly purchased the cheapest call centre possible in the Philippines and anything they say can only be assumed as a total lie (it took me half an hour to explain to this idiot that I was at the airport and heard the plane go around...).
Passengers have apparently been accommodated in ADL and will depart sometime tomorrow. They had to pay for their own transport (taxi - what else at 1am) from ADL into the city hotel.
Will be very interesting to see what happens in the morning. I see it being screwed up! I observed that an AVV-SYD service ended up diverting to LST. I hate to say it... but with the terrible weather forecast at MEL, SYD, NTL and BNE, I can't imagine why anyone would have departed knowing they would be arriving within 5-10 minutes of the curfew :shock: I'm sure the passengers would have much preferred to stay at their origin rather than spend 4-5 hours sitting on an aircraft that ends up on the other side of the country.
