Full Flight: Jetstar: Honolulu-Sydney

In this video, after spending the night inside a section of the airside, I wake up early. Unfortunately, the Jetstar app did not provide me an option to check-in online for this flight, most likely because they wanted to perform an in person checkin to weigh everyone's carryons as a way to charge extra to checkin bags that exceed weight requirements. I never left the airside, since my previous flight was a domestic flight, and unlike other countries, in the United States, domestic flights and international flights depart out of the same boarding area, and one does not need to clear passport control or leave the airside to head from a domestic flight to an international flight. I was waiting for an airline employee to come to my boarding gate so that I would not miss my checkin deadline. Luckily, I was able to checkin at the gate itself, and considering my carryon and personal laptop bag both exceeded the maximum 7-kilogram limit, I was lucky the employee did not weigh my bags, and she just put tags on both of them. Then, I was about to board, and I was able to at least fly on the Dreamliner for the first time ever. It was nice to see that instead of window shades, there were five different settings to dim the windows, and even at the maximum dimness, I could still see out of the window, though it would look blue. For this flight, since it was fulltime daylight, there was no need to dim the windows, though many did to avoid the sunshine. I then board my flight, and we pushback. It was reverse pattern today morning, so I got to experience a short taxi to Runway 26R instead. Only downside was that despite I was sitting on the left side, I could not get to see views of Waikiki like I would have if I took off from Runway 8L or 8R. It was a straight out departure over Oahu, and then, we just climbed to our cruising altitude. This is my first time flying an ultra-low cost airliner for a long-haul international flight, so this was an interesting experience as the inflight entertainment costed money, meaning I was limited to just watching the flight tracker. Of course, no free meals, which was a first for a flight longer than 6 and a half hours in my case. However, we were allowed to purchase as many meals as we wanted to whenever wanted to, and we could choose from a wide range of options unlike with most airlines having flights this long, where we would only be given two meals of items that are not our choice, and it would only be at the very beginning of the flight and around an hour and a half before the end of the flight. Since, I was able to choose my own meals, I was able to enjoy some good food options with a drink, and also, we could add a snack for just 2 dollars more if we bought both a food and a drink. Then, we were south of the equator and east of the International Dateline, and then, eventually, we were nearing Australia. We began our descend. Thankfully, since I was sitting on the left side and runway operations were southbound, by the time we entered over the coast of New South Wales, we turned right, and I could get views of the airport and Downtown Sydney with the Syndey Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge. We then made a left turn, and despite being a widebody arriving at the international terminal, I was lucky enough to experience a landing on Runway 16L to enjoy a nice long taxi that would involve crossing Runway 16R, which is the runway international widebodies tend to use as it is next to their terminal, and some even flying over the airport to make a westbound approach for this runway according to FlightAware. We then arrived at the gate. Despite hearing bad things about JetStar, my experience with this airline was better than I had expected, and better than some major airlines I had flown with. Only two downsides were that, when I ordered my second meal, the flight attendants forgot about it, and I waited 15 minutes, and luckily, I was able to call a flight attendent, who brought me my meal only to find out they forget to deliver the meal to me. The other downside was that the passenger next to me had really bad body odor, though he was still friendly to me. Interestingly enough, all of the flight attendants for this flight were East Asian, which was not surprising considering a huge chunk of the locals living in Sydney are East Asian, particularly Chinese and Thai. I say this, cause the next Jetstar flight I took after this did not have any East Asian flight attendants, and this was the first time I had experienced a fully East Asian flight crew for a flight with an airline that is not based in Hawaii or Asia. Either way, this was an interesting experience for me. Qantas was the airline I ideally wanted to fly with, or even Air New Zealand, but both were at least double or triple in airfare, and even with the amount paid for food, this airline was pretty decent.

FlightAware: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flig...