Early signs you have the Frequent Flyer Bug

[here2go]

I am currently in BNE visiting my folks with the kids, and my folks pulled out a toy from my youth in LAE, where there was a lot of commuting between LAE-POM-BNE with PX and QF.

I thought you would all appreciate this, especially the additional logo on the plane.


What early indicators of the travel bug do you have from your toddler or youth days?

 

[Hvr]

I still have the Ansett ticket from a school trip to Tasmania. This was the 70s and a group booking ticket. The actual price per passenger was quite low.

 

[harvyk]

I used to build lego planes as a kid. I also remember making a "real sized coughpit" out of lego, using some lego technic to make gauges and dials. and whilst I had never flown with QF at the time, I remember drawing QF logos and placing them everywhere in the "coughpit". Infact that probably says a lot about another "real sized coughpit" project I'm right now working on...

 

[erkpod]

Unlike many children today, I never got to fly on a jet plane until I got a job & decided not to use my staff travel to travel interstate. My first flight would have been to Melbourne on Ansett in the mid 90's.

Before my first flight, I went on a school excursion to the QF Jetbase in Sydney in (I think) primary school.

I'd never traveled OS until 2009 but have certainly made up for that since!

 

[cirqueboy]

My first trip OS was when I was 8. I have vague memories of London double decker busses, the Edinburgh Tattoo, Loch Ness, my grandfather's birth place now happily inhabited by Edinburgh Airport, a mermaid on a rock in Copenhagen, huge cheese wheels and violets in a roundabout of a tram stop in Amsterdam, Hands Christen Anderson's house, the house where Anne hid during WW2 and some major humidity I had never experienced before during a stop over in Darwin on the way home. There was also a Eiffel Tower in there some where.

 

[Shelf]

I loved trips to see people off/arrive at the old ADL terminals.

Going into the AN lounges with the old man and harvesting their food options!

 

[Buzzard]

I still have my BOAC Junior Jet Club book from 1967.

Until early this year it had only one entry in it.

In January I flew LHR - TXL with BA and asked for the captain to sign it. A month later I flew BA from BCN - LHR and again asked for the book to be signed.
To everybody's astonishment I was on exactly the same aircraft as a month previous. The captain waited for me to disembark, shook my hand and greeted me saying that the only other one of these books he has seen is his own!

I must be the oldest Junior Jet Club member still flying! I also have the BOAC badge issued with the book.

 

[bass_ke]

Spending afternoons with my grandfather at BWT watching GA and the Kendell Saab got me addicted!

In my teens I always wanted more take offs and landings in our routings and loved watching all the big international aircraft from the observation deck at MEL, I loved the TG tri jets!

My 15 month old daughter is already addicted, already been on types from C208 to 772, took her first flight at 6 weeks old and started jumping and giggling during take off roll from 9 months on. Now she spots aircraft before I do whilst driving along!

 

[elbarto]

I used to make a planes out of lego. When I was bored at school I'd stick my ruler into the shirt clip at the end of my pen and taxi it around the desk.

 

[drron]

Spending afternoons with my grandfather at BWT watching GA and the Kendell Saab got me addicted!

In my teens I always wanted more take offs and landings in our routings and loved watching all the big international aircraft from the observation deck at MEL, I loved the TG tri jets!

My 15 month old daughter is already addicted, already been on types from C208 to 772, took her first flight at 6 weeks old and started jumping and giggling during take off roll from 9 months on. Now she spots aircraft before I do whilst driving along!

And the trains?

 

[JohnK]

Didn't started flying until 26 years of age and then again at 30 years of age.

Then had a break until I was 39 years of age and have not stopped the madness since....

 

[DaveB]

My father spent most of his career between the army in Japan after the war and Qantas for close on 30 years until retirement. Spent his early QF years, and ours between Lae, Port Morseby and Darwin before becoming ensconced in head office in Sydney.
First flight I remembered was a 1969 flight to London on a 707 that had 4 stops including Perth and Vienna, though I think the Perth leg was due to being a freebie.
Forget the name of the Arab stop, Bahrain maybe, but will never forget the machine gun emplacements all the way down the runway.

 

[whatmeworry]

I always loved going to MEL to see planes land and take off, seeing off and greeting friends/Relatives.
Oh how I miss the days of free parking at MEL and the observation deck!
I even did my work experience at the maintenance division at QF.
To think I had to wait to the age of 22 to fly.

 

[Skyring]

I was eight when my family moved from Melbourne to the Gold Coast. Dad had just sold the house and was flush with money, so we flew from Essendon - just caught the plane by the skin of our teeth - in some old Vickers to Sydney and then to Coolangatta. I remember hanging out the window and seeing the Harbour Bridge. Never forget that.

At Coolangatta you could get joyrides over the coast in a Cessna - Five Adults for a Fiver, the sign promised - but I never had that much money, and would watch from our house at Bilinga.

Read Biggles in school as often as possible, and any spare paper was either covered with squadrons of WWI fighters shooting each other up or made into a paper plane. Sometimes both. And yeah, I used to make pen/ruler flying craft and use my desk as an airfield when I thought Mr Hill who had been in the RAAF in WWII wasn't looking. He always had eyes in the back of his head and must have smiled.

Schools, home and uni were all under the BNE-SYD flight path and I'd watch the 727s and DC-9s climb out of Eagle Farm. Sometimes I'd follow their progress with my telescope, wondering if there was anybody looking back.

I think my dream job was working for Defence at Campbell Park as a programmer, overlooking Fairbairn and watching the regular commercial flights and the exotica that often flew in.

And now, well! I guess that little boy who dreamt of flying to all the places he read about in books is still inside somewhere, happy as anything.

Oddly enough it's my daughter who caught the bug. We'd park at the end of the runway and watch the 737s come in, smiling at each other as vortices of jet fuel wafted down after the thrill of looking at the underside of a Boeing. My son would punch the air in feigned excitement - his heart wasn't in it.

 

[here2go]

Oddly enough it's my daughter who caught the bug. We'd park at the end of the runway and watch the 737s come in, smiling at each other as vortices of jet fuel wafted down after the thrill of looking at the underside of a Boeing. My son would punch the air in feigned excitement - his heart wasn't in it.

Living close to DRW, my 22 month old daughter can distinguish the difference by sound alone a plane and a helicopter. That said, it isn't hard - helicopters often fly low and over the top, and the whole house shakes when a Blackhawk/Seahawk or 19 seater en route to the Timor Oil Rigs comes by.

 

[puppysparkes]

Back in the day my father worked for DCA in PNG so I spent a fair bit of time around RAB, POM and MAG airports. During my teens my school holidays were spent sitting in the ATC tower in MAG marvelling at the daily operations and aircraft movements. He travelled extensively on PX back in the day and knew most of the pilots; consequently when we travlled I thought it was the norm to visit the flight deck or sit in the jump seat and often made this request on boarding. (all well prior to 9/11)

I am currently in BNE visiting my folks with the kids, and my folks pulled out a toy from my youth in LAE, where there was a lot of commuting between LAE-POM-BNE with PX and QF.

I thought you would all appreciate this, especially the additional logo on the plane.
View attachment 16883

What early indicators of the travel bug do you have from your toddler or youth days?

 

[OATEK]

My first unaccompanied flight was aged 8, HBA-MEB?-SYD-PQQ! Never looked back.

 

[beardoc]

When I was a kid in GLT (and GLT was a much smaller place with an airport that was largely a couple of buildings and an outside area where you walked through a gate in a wire fence to cross the tarmac and board the planes), I would find any reason to go out to the airport - if a family friend was arriving or leaving, I would make sure I was there to see the plane come in. Back then Sunstate ran Shorts 360 aircraft which were truly awful, but I would make sure we were there to see the plane land, and if they were leaving, I'd watch it go.

Back then, I dreamed of being able to fly in those planes. I was an aviation fanatic.

Now, I have been lucky enough to fly most of the Airbus and Boeing planes, a pile of helicopters (and appreciate the differences between them, as well as winch in and out of them too) and a series of small jets (Learjets, Beechcraft jets and even the Cessna Citation X which was awesome!) nationally and internationally. It never gets boring - and now that I am back on the ground and on another project, I still am planning my return to the helicopters for work, part time. Every takeoff (be it work or pleasure, in a private aircraft or commercial) is magic - I grin every time the plane takes off and that magic moment when you lift off the ground happens.

I never thought when I was a kid that I would be lucky enough to fly this much. And the magic still hasn't gone, even in a Y seat longhaul. Even if we didn't have QFF, or any airline loyalty program, I would still be flying and loving it. That I'm WP just adds to the excitement and the thrill.

But even back as a kid, you could see that I was a budding Frequent Flyer fanatic.