Fair to say he wasn’t happy when a half hour delay was attributed to a late arriving crew, on a Qantas flight.

“So yet more thumb-twiddling and patience-showing. Great work, Qantas!,” he said, before posting a text from the airline that many passengers would recognise, along with his own caption reading: “No Qantas I don’t think you’re ‘sorry’ at all”.

After another text, Eslake’s exasperation was heading sky high: “Oh Qantas are ‘sorry’ again – BS, BS, BS!!!”

Eslake told his followers that this flight was going to be leaving Sydney 15 minutes after its original scheduled arrival time in Hobart.

“It just staggers me how they all expect you to just “suck it up”. And if you try to take it up with their “customer relations” teams, you get the sort of formulaic BS responses (“we sincerely regret … “, “we understand” – but we’re not going to do anything) that I used to have to write as a very junior Treasury officer in the late 1970s to people who were naive enough to think that when they wrote to the Treasurer he gave their correspondence his personal attention.”

When CBD caught up with a still-cranky Eslake on Monday, he had more to say about his woes, detailing traipsing miles through Hong Kong airport thanks to multiple gate changes, a Cathay-rejected request for a helping hand off the plane from his row 50 seat and a fruitless plea for understanding from Qantas at the Sydney transfer desk 20 minutes before his Hobart plane left.

It should be noted there was some bad weather around on Sunday that affected flights in and out of Sydney but that wasn’t going far with Eslake who has been a frequent flyer member with Qantas since 1989.

We dropped a line to Qantas, which declined to comment, and Cathay. We will let you know when we hear back.

We’re almost certain they “sincerely regret” the delay.

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