Photo / Winston Aldworth
Winston Aldworth flies aboard Singapore Airlines flight SQ528 from Singapore to Chennai.
The plane: An A330-300. Singapore Airlines operates 19 of these big birds.
My seat: I was in 11H. I folded the seat out to get a glorious lie-flat bed.
Class: Business. It's a 2-2-2 configuration, with forward-facing lie-flat beds. Loads of seat width.
Price: $5794 Auckland to Chennai Business Class return.
How full: To the brim. There are 30 seats in Business and 255 in Economy.
Flight time: We were in the sky for 4hr 15min, having departed Changi at 8.25pm and landed in India at 10pm. If you're coming straight through from New Zealand, get a couple of hours of snoozing done on this flight, as it's pretty much 6am NZ time once you're out of the airport.
Toilets: Minty fresh.
Entertainment: As the law currently seems to demand, most of my fellow passengers were either watching Bohemian Rhapsody or A Star is Born. I nailed a New York Times while waiting for dinner, then watched the back of my eyelids for the last two hours of the service.
Fellow passengers: A solid Indian contingent (Changi remains the hub of choice for the region) and plenty of Europeans, including six other travel writers in my group heading to India on an Adventure World trip.
Food and drink: A top-notch curry with poppadoms set the scene for our arrival in India.
Airport experience: Four hours passes pretty quickly in Changi. Having arrived from Auckland on my way to India, I had plenty of time to redeem my Changi transit credit for $20 and use it to buy a new T-shirt at Zara, before settling in at the Terminal Three SilverKris lounge.
Final word: The front of the SQ A330s is a superb place for Kiwi travellers to complete their journey into Asia. If you're coming from Auckland (as I did) be aware you'll need to get some shut eye on this connection, having landed from a day flight. By the time I rested my head at the fabulous Taj Connemara in Chennai, it was 6.30am in Auckland.
When there's nothing as far as the eye can see, you may appreciate the company.