I managed to get an excellent sleep in the airport hotel last night, although a longer time in bed would have been welcome. Nonetheless I felt refreshed and ready for today’s journey – a journey that would occupy the entire day.
My flight from Addis Ababa to Johannesburg (ET809) was on an Ethiopian Airlines Airbus A350-900, registration ET-AUC. With a great circle distance of 4,049 kilometres it was scheduled to take 5 hours and 25 minutes, departing at 8:40am and landing at 1:05pm (with a one hour time difference). The experience was almost like clockwork – we pushed back 6 minutes late at 8:46am and landed one minute late at 1:06pm.
Like all my flights on this trip with Ethiopian Airlines it was a wonderful experience in every way – it is a very impressive airline. Although conditions were overcast with low clouds when we took off in Addis Ababa, the clouds cleared after we had flown southwards for about an hour and I had lovely, clear views of the landscape below for most of the trip on a route that passed over such spectacular areas as Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Mweru, Lusaka, Lake Kariba, and of course, Johannesburg on final approach to the airport.
My transit in Johannesburg was a long one – just over eight hours. I wasn’t worried as the beautiful afternoon sunlight gave me a wonderful opportunity to do lots of plane spotting and photography of some rare and usual airlines. It even gave me a chance to get a (poorly lit and badly angled) photo of the plane I will take tonight for the next sector of my flight, which is to London on a British Airways Airbus A380 (G-XLEF).
That flight is scheduled to take off at 9:20pm tonight, which means most of the 11 hour flight will be tomorrow, so I’ll save that description for tomorrow’s chapter of the diary.
