AviatorInsight and Mr Pumblechook, great on the spot reports. Those of us who were not at BNE (the vast majority of AFF members) would never have known of low visibility as the public BOM half hourly reports (i.e. not delving into the more technical reports of interest to aviation) indicated only a little rain at Brisbane Airport this afternoon.
AviatorInsight, creditably, you were on time for the first three sectors if you commenced the day in Sydney on VA505 at about 0700 so a score of 75 per cent is well above a pass!
I was going to say that the aircraft was intensively used today with seven sectors operated but according to FR24, on Thursday 19 October it is doing three return MEL - CBRs, a MEL - MQL return (I've been on one of those flights fairly recently, but only one way as one leg was on V/Line rail and coach: V/Line carries more passengers to Mildura daily than VA) and a MEL - SYD single trip, making a total of nine sectors. These repeated short sectors must impose stress on airframes.
With both QF and VA, the roster intensity for individual aircraft seem to vary quite a bit and it isn't all that unusual for some 'frames' not to be used terribly intensively on Mondays to Wednesdays and Saturdays as well, and perhaps Sunday mornings.
In particular, some aircraft have the luxury of a break around lunchtime (absolute non peak hour) that allows time to be caught up if there were morning delays.
VA seem to be good at (failures excepted) rostering the same aircraft for multiple consecutive days for the same flights. I've seen that happen for up to five or six days which is quite impressive.