Dean's Aeroplane Curse strikes again

Back in October when this blog was still in its nascent form, my first post after leaving England mentioned how my British Airways aircraft had had to abort its return journey to London one hour after takeoff after the fire alarms went off.

Clearly I have some sort of jinx over airplanes because today's news featured interviews with terrified passengers who "feared for their lives" after one of the engines of Qantas flight QF10 caught fire 45 minutes after takeoff from Singapore. Sure enough, that's the same Qantas QF10 from Singapore to Melbourne that I was on a couple of weeks back...

Qantas has notified Australia's air safety authorities after a Boeing 747, with 354 passengers aboard, had to return to Singapore's Changi Airport after passengers saw flames lick out of one of the engines.

The plane was flying at 31,000 feet at the time, about 45 minutes into the flight. Dylan Brady, 38, was on board when the plane ''convulsed and lost power''.

''[My business partner and I] both thought something had fallen off the bottom, or the landing gear had come undone,'' he said. ''Then we saw this orange light and we both looked out the window to see fire coming out of the back of the jet. It was pretty scary.''

It logically follows that people planning on flying from Sydney to Auckland should be aware that I'm flying on the 14th January, and should plan to leave before then...