AirAsia Bloggers’ Community Party @ Air Asia Academy

Say hi to me and my fabulous GREEN team during the AirAsia Bloggers’ Community Party! 🙂

AirAsia threw an unforgettable party for us just last week. Besides meeting and making new friends; both bloggers & the high-spirited Air Asia team, the opportunity to experience flight simulation, explore the Air Asia Academy and gaining valuable insights of the aviation world was priceless. I bet most of you will never get to experience that in your life! 😉

All in all, time well spent and fabulous fun.
Bloggers from Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Malaysia gathered, took part in challenges in teams, answered trivia questions and some lucky ones walked away with flight tickets to some AirAsia as well as Air Asia X destinations.
As usual, moi never had much luck with such luck-based schemes and went home empty handed. Oh wait, I did “win” something from Air Asia before, purely based on luck, and that was the most memorable event of 2012!
I wish Dato Tony was around that day so I could give him a hug & thank him in person! 😀

I finally landed in Japan soil last year and had a great time. You can read more about my Japan adventures on my Travel Page. The kind people at AAX upgraded me to the Premium Seats and that, that was THE WAY to travel on AAX.
Utmost comfort for a very reasonable price!

Yes, I do have great memories with the AAX team (Kathmandu, Shanghai and most recently Busan in Korea) and I wish of the same with the AA team.

Being around the brand Air Asia always bought back memories of travel. I go to Singapore once a month and my flight is always RM100 or less (only hand-carry) one-way. That totally beats sitting in a bus for 5 hours.
During the launch of Your Singapore Live, there were 27,000 free seats to Singapore being given away. So yes, if you keep your eyes peeled and diligent check AirAsia.com, cheap travel on Air Asia is totally possible!

As some of you may know, I just came back from Bangkok after a bloggers’ and social media conference with DIAsiaTourism (Digital Innovation Asia). The conference spoke of blogging, social media and SoLoMo – social, local, mobile.
I met the PATA CEO Martin Craig who in one of his address spoke highly of Dato Tony and his contributions to the travel industry.

*Picture credit to DIAsiaTourism. And yes that’s PATA CEO Martin Craig. 

We can’t deny that the tourism industry is thriving. A lot of us travel, a lot of us love traveling. We board our flights and we listen to the captain speak. But has anyone actually seen the cockpit of an Airbus?

Well for some of us, we sat in one! 🙂

And “took off and landed a plane” too!

The flight simulators are in operation 24 hours a day. Here at the Air Asia Academy, these state of the art machines are even rented out for use to other airlines for their crew’s practice sessions.

I watched Star Trek just the week before and I felt as if I was on the film set as I walked pass these “space pods”. They do look canggih (futuristic) don’t they? 🙂

The moment it was our turn to step inside, being the consummate bloggers that we are, we couldn’t stop snapping away. Everything is high-sci and multi-faceted sophistication. Best of all, it’s REAL!

I don’t quite remember his name but I saw him (the captain) on Air Asia Travel 360 magazine on my flight back from BKK. I think it’s the same guy?

You can read his article here: http://www.airasia.com/travel3sixty/winds-beneath-your-wings/3. He has logged a total of more than 25,500 flying hours and prior to being a Simulator Flight Instructor with Air Asia X, he is a former AirAsia Airbus A320 and AirAsia X A330/A340 pilot who also used to fly the Boeing 777.

It was a 30 minutes session and we were the pilots responsible to take off and land the plane. The “journey” begun from LCCT (duh, where else) and we flew pass well, anywhere we could think of. It was Paris then suddenly Penang and then we were in Aussie skies.
It’s anywhere you want yourself to be! LOL.

I haven’t expected such a surreal experience. We can literally feel the “movement” of the plane as we took the runway, the torque as we scaled to the skies and the view, one could easily mistaken all of it to be REAL.

As expected we poked and pressed on most of the knobs, buttons and controls on the “dashboard”. 🙂

And yes, it is so REAL that one could get airsick too. *gulps*.

All too soon it was time to land. And thankfully we didn’t crash the plane.

Now I know what the pilot sees/look out for when he/she wanted to land on a particular runway. Enlightening indeed! I felt smarter already. 😀

I stumbled out of the cockpit before I puke all over the controls and we assembled our team to our next challenge. And what do you know, we were supposed to be a plane next!

At this challenge we learnt that there is an Indonesian (Balinese to be exact) Hot Meal named after the local celebrity Farah Quinn whom I met during the press conference of The Big Break, an AFC channel production.
It’s called Farah Quinn’s Nasi Jinggo. Geez, I’m interested to taste it now!

At another challenge we learned the signals and technicalities of maneuvering the aircraft to a stop upon landing. Our team’s aircraft must have crashed into the hangers on the runway multiple times if it was a real exercise. -_-

One of the best challenge of the day was mimicking the “special team” that comes on board AA flights only if the flight is deemed in need of serious entertainment.

This team makes the usual “I’ll just ignore and look at my phone/book” safety procedure session fun. They dance, sing and does crazy antics as they bring the passengers through the entire exercise. There was even background music to accompany the whole act!

They were crazy, but I think our team did a better job! 😉

There were food, prizes and goody bags at the end of the day. Thank you Air Asia for the experience. You guys do know how to throw a party! 🙂

Good job team mates! What a day it was yeah? 🙂

Yes, we had fun. Was it obvious? 😛

Note: Pictures without my watermark are courtesy of Air Asia Facebook album.