On another note, is AJ an engineer?
No, his qualifications mark him as a physicist-come-mathematician. IMO that's much worse than an engineer.
Could this now mean on weekdays in Y there will be newspapers in the morning and wine or beer after 4pm for all Qantas domestic flights (except Perth transcontinental)?
It could make sense in the competition with Virgin. Or maybe even offer it 7 days/week? The other parts of City Flyer disappeared long ago.
I remember those corny CityFlyer ads involving one smart businessman and another smart-alack businessman. One was talking about how flying Qantas meant staying loyal to the great marsupial that is the symbol of Australia, whilst the other was talking about how Qantas knows he likes his newspaper in the morning and a cold beer in the evening.
How times have changed.
In any case, the way I see it is that CityFlyer was supposed to guarantee a certain standard (or set of) service for a certain set of routes (i.e. mainly the inter-capital ones). For non-CityFlyer routes, you didn't know what you were getting, period.
That's all changed. And the separation of CityFlyer baggage belts and non-CityFlyer baggage belts is ridiculous (it didn't offer any advantage having a "dedicated" belt for CityFlyer). And I don't know how I initially liked it, but separating the FIDS boards between CityFlyer and non-CityFlyer flights is a stupid idea. That said, QF could also see to upgrade their FIDS systems in the major centres. (Most are confusing; e.g. in Brisbane the old-style FIDS list all flights with their codeshares, which means you can normally only see 30 minutes of flights at a time if you're lucky; in other centres when the status of a flight changes to 'BOARDING' or 'FINAL CALL', it covers up the destination of the flight, which is OK for most of us but not so OK for the casual flyer).
I know this is going to be almost uncanny to suggest, but I'd advocate that QF should offer complimentary alcohol to the Y cabin on
all flights with scheduled departure after 11.30am, every day of the week. They can restrict it to beer, red wine and white wine if they must; perhaps if they really want to then pre-4pm they can restrict it to
one alcoholic drink per pax. I'm not saying this because I know some people would love to have a tipple (ish) earlier in the day - I'm just saying that for a supposed "premium" (everyone on the count of 3: 1, 2, 3...
) carrier with full inclusive service, I thought that would be a key ingredient to stamping that kind of authority. Of course, then the next step is to open the bar earlier on all clubs around Australia (viz. 11.00 - 11.30 am opening to match the onboard service). [Aside: I'm guessing if this did happen, some advocacy group might get up and claim that Qantas is promoting the irresponsible consumption of alcohol by making it freely available]