The 22.35 Oman Air flight turns out to be the last flight scheduled from Heathrow each day.
Since, at night, there is no view – I had lots of time to read the inflight magazine. For the national airline I was disappointed that the In-Flight magazine was riddled with errors about Oman.
The error standouts were in an article about Bandar Khiran and its “placid bay” with “no sound pollution, vehicle pollution” . While the main photo was of Bandar Khiran; one of the others was of the residential area of Wadi Kabir (not a bit of water in sight should have been a give-away for the team responsible for the article ) and the other of Bandar Jissah – both many kilometers from Bandar Khiran – but both labeled up, Bandar Khiran For any unsuspecting reader who relied on the “How to go” section – they would urgently need an accurate “How to get back” as the “How to go” section is seriously inaccurate !
Key factual errors were added for good measure about the Mausoleum at Qalhat ‘Bibi Miriam’. This was stated to have been built for a lady ‘Bibi Miriam’ – but was in fact built by her for her Turkish husband, who was the ruler of Qalhat & Hormuz at the start of the 14thC.
Despite all that I managed to get sleep and woke to the announcement that we were descending intoMuscat.
Swinging round we approached from the East and descended past Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque to land about 45 minutes early .
Mathew – the service was fine; they organized my food immediately after take off as I was ‘starving’ and very kindly left me asleep . The in-flight magazine is consistently poor – but those images should have spoken for themselves – but since they cant have , it was worth a shout.
I’m also not impressed with Oman Air’s inflight magazine – a real missed opportunity, as I outlined in my blog post about good inflights:
http://quitealone.com/2009/07/08/gulf-of-understanding
– but the saving grace is that it’s better than the Saudi Airlines mag… and you should see Air Malta’s…
Like you I spotted that Oman Air was the last flight of the day out of LHR – but, then again, Heathrow has at least 25 flights scheduled to depart in the last 40 minutes of service (21:55-22:35 each day), so there’s no guarantee that Oman Air would actually be the last off the tarmac! Plus six scheduled arrivals after 22:30 too. No respite for the residents of Hounslow…
Excellent onboard service, I thought – for service, Oman Air was head & shoulders above Emirates, Etihad and the rest.