Maybe this time

Off to the airport. Hope things go better tonight than last night.

Check-in is open when we get there, so up we go. As expected, on standby, and hold our bags. Come back in 2 hours. No hint of our chances. We think OK, but who knows.

Tom Bradley is not very large on the public side. Food outlets upstairs, a handful of retail downstairs.
The wait is boring. At 2100 we join the queue of staff. We meet up with the guy we spoke to at JFK last night. His son-in-law works for QF in SYD, so he is way down on the food chain. As I said, no staff got onto the QF flight out of JFK last night. We flew direct at great expense. He slept in the airport, and flew via a couple of way-points today. Last night Sarah gave him the rundown on how staff travel works. Today she continues the lessons.

2130, still no activity. 2145 a QF crew arrive, so have to drop their bags at the counter we are all waiting at. 2200, and they start calling out names. I don't know if they are in any particular order, because we should be pretty high priority. One asian couple ahead of us are called up. One gets business class, one economy. I didn't get to see how chivalrous he was.
Then us. We are on. Drop the bags, pick up the boarding passes. Small number row, excellent. That will make the journey bearable. Not together, but within food throwing distance.

Our new BFF is also coming. His row is a much larger number. Never mind, he is on at least. That's good.

Up the airbridge to the upstairs door. My God this corridor is long. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, up and up. It just keeps going and going. Somewhere at the end of here is an aircraft. Somewhere.

Here we are, turn left and settle in. We are off.