A New Toy

Tim is supposed to fly to DFW today. It might be a problem, because we've been having major storms here.  I went to the DFW website to see if flights are being canceled. It's good so far. Though there are no storms right now, so that's not saying much.

While I was on the site, I decided to check on Qantas. There's a flight that was supposed to arrive at 1:35, but now it looks like they're coming in at 1:10. That might be good. They'll be early. Although as luck usually has it, they'll probably be stuck out there for awhile waiting for a gate.

What's really awesome is I discovered you can track the flight. There's a link to a map that shows where the flight is. I wonder if it's very accurate.

Right now, the site shows that the Qantas plane is in Mexico. It's above a city called Hermosilla.

The site also provides positional information.  You can see the altitude of the plane, it's speed, longitude, latitude, distance from Sydney, and distance from DFW. There's also something called "bearing".  I don't know what that is.  Lord Wiki says it has something to do with direction. Well, he says much more than that, actually. But it goes way over my head.

I'm wondering if the Sydney airport has similar information. I'm guessing it does. I hope so.

I'm going to try to find it....

Here's the page for their international arrivals. And here are the domestic ones.

What time is it in Sydney right now?  I think it's in the middle of the night, so there's probably not a lot of flying taking place.

Just checked my phone. It's 2:43 am.

The next domestic flight scheduled to come in is a Jetstar flight from Darwin. It's expected at 5:55.

I'm not seeing any map.

What time is it in Darwin?

2:15. The flight left at 1:20—about an hour ago.

I wonder if most of the people on the flight are sleeping right now. What about the ones with insomnia? What are they thinking about? What are they doing?

Now I'm looking at International Arrivals. The first on the list is London via Singapore. That's arriving at 5:05.

I wonder how many of those people are returning home to Australia. Were they in the UK for business? Holiday? Other?  Maybe there are some Australians who live in the UK, but are visiting Australia for Mother's Day.

I wonder if there are people on the plane visiting Australia for the first time. Are they excited? Exhausted? What are their plans for their first day in Australia?

Now I'm looking at the flight information.

The flight left London at 9:35 PM on May 7.  That would have been 3:45 PM my time, and in Sydney it would have been 6:35 AM on May 8.  At least I think so. I might have things wrong here. I'm not good with all this time difference stuff.

The plane arrived in Singapore at 5:40 on May 8. Wow! That's a long flight.

Or at least it seems long.

I'm counting on my fingers here.

It's about twenty hours, I think.

I shouldn't be too appalled.

I think that's how long it takes Qantas to get from Sydney to DFW. Or DFW to Sydney. One way is quite longer than the other.

But at least with that flight, we'd be done with the whole thing. This London-Singapore-Australia flight still has another leg after the twenty hours.

The plane left at 7:20 PM Singapore time.

If I'm counting right, that's another ten hours.

Holy shit!

Now I'm looking at the flight arriving from DFW.  It left last night, close to midnight.  It's arriving at 8:00 AM.  Though it was scheduled to arrive at 6:30. Maybe it was delayed because of the storms.

WAIT!

I just realized I did the Singapore math wrong. I forgot about the time difference.

My brain is all confused right now.

Okay. To do this math correctly, I need to change everything to one time zone.

Let's go with Sydney.

The plane left London at 6:35 AM on May 8.  It arrived in Singapore at 7:40 PM, May 8.  It left at 9:20 PM.  Then it's arriving this morning at 5:05 AM.

I hope I got that right.

If I did, it's not as bad as I thought. It's about eleven hours to get to Singapore, and then eight hours to get to Sydney.

Now I'm going to get back to the DFW Qantas flight. That would have left 2:29 PM, Sydney Time. And it's arriving at 8 in the morning.  That's about eighteen hours.  So it's about the same as what the folks coming from the UK have to endure.

No...I still feel I did something wrong with the math. There's only a two hour time difference between Sydney and Singapore. How then did I go from it being a 30 hour trip to only 19 hours?

My brain is a mess right now.  Help!

Oh! I think I know what it is. It wasn't the difference between Singapore and Sydney time that had me going wrong. It was the difference between Singapore and London time.   I had the UK people leaving London at 9:35 PM, and then arriving at 5:40 PM London time.  But it would have actually been 10:40 AM London time.

Hopefully my math brain is working now.

Before I end this very confusing post, I'm going to check on the Qantas flight that's headed to DFW.

They're no longer in Mexico. Now they're in Texas!  Close to Midland. They shall be arriving soon.  I hope they have a safe-landing. If they're returning from Australia, I hope they had a wonderful time. That and I'm really jealous of them.  Well...maybe not, because it's the end of their trip.  They might have post-holiday blues.

For those visiting from Australia, I hope it's for pleasure and not something stressful and/or sad.  I hope they have a wonderful time.  I'm really curious what they're planning to do here. I imagine they'd want to visit other places besides Dallas and Fort Worth. Maybe they're going to NYC or Disney World?  They could be visiting the Grand Canyon, though.  I think it would be a shorter drive to do that from LAX.

Yeah. Google Maps confirms that.

Hey...if any Australian reading this has flown from Sydney to DFW, and you don't mind my nosiness...please tell me what you did. Where did you go?  Did you do anything in Dallas/Fort Worth? Did you travel to nearby states? Did you quickly leave DFW via a connecting flight? Did you do a fabulous road trip?  I want to know!