October 24th - Connecting flights, and why you shouldn't fret too much about them
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Simon Calder is in Darwin, Australia, where he's talking you through why you don’t need to fret over connecting flights (or even check any luggage).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. |
| 0:07.9 | Luckily for me, I am in the tropics, in specifically the Australian city of Darwin in the Northern Territory. |
| 0:18.7 | I have flown in on a connecting flight and that is the subject of |
| 0:24.7 | today's podcast because there's an awful lot of confusion and stress and uncertainty all to do |
| 0:33.6 | with connecting flights. So I wanted to talk through what the options are. |
| 0:39.3 | If we can start with my journey I flew on Singapore Airlines. |
| 0:45.3 | The flight was about half an hour late leaving London Heathrow due to well a little of slow boarding, I think. It was an absolutely |
| 0:57.0 | full flight. And also air traffic control delays. And that largely results from the appalling |
| 1:08.0 | Russian war against Ukraine because normally if you're going to Singapore, the easiest route is to go straight over Belarus and Russia. |
| 1:19.6 | Alternatively, you might fly over Ukraine. Those options are out of the way and so therefore flights are taking longer and airspace is getting more crowded. |
| 1:29.3 | We arrived finally 25 minutes late in Singapore. Now since my connection was exactly one hour |
| 1:38.3 | that left only 35 minutes to get to my next flight. Nobody, I think, was more relaxed than me because |
| 1:47.8 | I've flown through Changi Airport before in Singapore. It is very well organised. I can barely |
| 1:54.7 | believe it though when the aircraft I was on pulled up at the gate adjacent to the one that the connecting flight to Darwin was going on. |
| 2:03.6 | It was just a little Boeing 737 max. |
| 2:06.6 | But there we had this giant Airbus A380 right next to the Boeing 737. |
| 2:13.6 | And although you've got to go through a security check it's all very efficient and there was |
| 2:20.4 | never any risk of missing the flight which itself departed just a little bit late anyway |
| 2:26.9 | the airlines are extremely good if they are a network carrier like Singapore Airways Airlines you as soon as you |
| 2:37.0 | arrived there was a whole list of flights saying right we know that these people |
| 2:42.7 | going to Auckland going to Hong Kong going to Darwin have tight connections |
| 2:48.9 | these are the gates you need to have to save you having to look them up. |
... |
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