Less Bliss and more Boredom

Three weeks after our inbound flight, it was time to say goodbye to the European summer and brace for the Australian winter. Not that we noticed much difference: we spent our first afternoon back in Australia soaking in the sun at Balmoral Beach, officially for the sole purpose of helping our Circadian Clock readjust itself to Australian time.

The flight back was very long, entirely experienced in economy class and entirely uneventful. The photo below was taken at sunrise over the Queensland coast, about one hour before touchdown at Sydney.

The Great Circle from Frankfurt to Seoul took us over Berlin, Gdansk at sunset, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, Riga and Tartu before entering Russian airspace not too far from St Petersburg.

Entering Russian airspace in a Korean Air 747 brings back memories of KAL 007, the airliner shot down by the USSR Air Force in 1983. I was only nine at the time but I remember reading about it in the Midi Libre newspaper while on summer holidays with my grandparents in the South of France. Not that I was reading international news at such an early age, I was most likely attracted to the article by a photo of the airliner.

In Russian airspace we used a metric flight level at 11000 meters. However, when flying from Poland to Lithuania through the small Russian territory around Kaliningrad, we stayed at FL 350, i.e. 35,000 feet above the reference datum of 1013.25 hPa.

The landscapes of the Gobi desert over Mongolia and north-western China reminded me of the Australian Outback, minus the color red. Then I realised that, since the Great Wall of China was built in order to ward off Mongolian invasions our flightpath would eventualy cross it and I could maybe spot it from the airplane. I remembered something about it being visible from space, so if I kept my face glued to the window I would not miss it. How awesome would that be.

Unfortunately this was not meant to be as a thick layer of stratus clouds started building below us as we approached Beijing from the north-west. Soon after the airliner altered its south-easterly course to track due south towards Beijing, before resuming a more direct route to Seoul.

The reason for the dogleg could be seen right out the window: a massive thunderstorm had developped right on our intended flightpath.

On approach to Seoul I could observe the little crystals of ice that build up on the inside side of the window quickly melt as we passed through the freezing level at about 15,000ft. Yes, I was utterly bored at this stage of the flight.

By the way, I learnt by reading a German flying magazine on holidays that the German word for freezing level is Nullgradgrenze, literaly "zero degree limit". Another funny one is Wolkenuntergrenze, which means cloud base.

We approached Sydney at sunrise, Brooklyn bridge is sort of visible on the photo below.

We landed on 34L at Sydney after a left-hand circuit. We cleared Customs and Quarantine relatively quickly and jumped into a cab direction home. Just like most cabs it had a GPS on the dashboard.

It's amazing how in the space of a couple of decades a classified military technology initially developed during the Cold War to guide ICBMs has now found its way into most cars, mobile phones and of course airplanes.

It's in 1983 that the Reagan Administration took the decision to declassify the NAVSTAR GPS satellite navigation system in order to allow civilian applications, such as better navigation systems for airplanes. It became operational in 1990, just in time for the first Gulf War.

A decision that was taken when it became clear that the downing of Korean Airlines flight KAL 007 by a Russian fighter jet had been triggered by a navigation error that took it over a prohibited section of Russian airspace.

Spot the airfield: Lombadina

On a Qantas flight from Brisbane to Singapore, right as our flight was about to leave the Australian continent, I spotted the Lombadina airstrip (YLBD) in the Dampier Peninsula.

Between the airstrip and the beach is the Lombadina Aboriginal community. According to the Lonely Planet guide, this community has a church built from mangrove wood. The local Aboriginals are the Bardi people.

In the larger picture below, the airstrip is the red line in the bottom-right corner. Lombadina used to be a simple red dirt strip and was upgraded to a sealed runway in 1998, at a cost of $800,000. Another airstrip can be seen near the leftmost piece of land, it is Cape Leveque (YCLQ), close to the Kooljaman wilderness camp.

Identifying the airstrip was made very easy by the use of the GPS functionality of my smartphone. OK, that's cheating, I know. I had a window seat, and putting the phone against the window was enough for the GPS receiver to pick up five satellites and give me a fix. And if you wonder, an altitude of 10821m means FL350. Computing the area QNH is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

I have to say I hesitated a bit before starting the GPS in-flight, being not really sure if it was allowed or not. So I had a look at the safety section of the Qantas in-flight magazine, which says pretty much the same as what can be found on their website:

Flight mode capable mobile phones and portable digital assistants (PDAs) may be used inflight provided the phone has been switched to flight mode before take-off. Flight mode enables you to operate the basic functions of your mobile phone or PDA while the transmitting function of your phone is switched off. You cannot make phone calls or send SMS whilst in flight mode.

My phone was obviously in "flight mode" and still allowed me to start the GPS, so I took that as an indication from the phone manufacturer that it was safe to operate the GPS in-flight. In addition, the GPS functionality is clearly not a "transmitting function" since it is only a receiver.

Writing this post I came across a list of airlines that explicitely allow the use of GPS receivers on board, and those who don't. Qantas is listed among the GPS-friendly airlines. The Web page makes an interesting point about GPS receivers generating less radiations than most portable devices, and certainly less than laptops whose users forget to turn Wifi or Bluetooth off. I even remember using Wifi Internet once in-flight on Singapore Airlines, before they shut down the service for commercial, not technical, reasons.

In related news, Qantas finished a trial phase for texting from mobile phones in-flight. Apparently everything went well, the avionics of the 767 used for the trial didn't suffer any disruption from the cell phone signals, and Qantas may start rolling out in-flight text messaging (during cruise only of course) as soon as the end of this year. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the set-up consists of a base station on the plane that uses a satellite link to connect to the telco wired backbone, similar to what was used to provide in-flight Internet access.

Sounds like the days of the extortionately-priced, credit-card-activated in-flight phone that one can find in the armrest are counted. In twenty years of flying airlines, I've only seen a passenger use this functionality once. But maybe that's because almost all of my flying as a passenger is done in economy class.