In order to make our ferry on to Turtle Island, off the coast of Sandakan, we had to get the first flight of the morning, AirAsia AK6492 to Sandakan, at 6:25am. Which, of course, meaning having to check out of our hotel in Kota Kinabalu, with great sadness, at around 4:15am.

Kota Kinabalu Airport has everything you need – but not much more – for a small, regional airport and AirAsia has now moved to largely automated baggage drop.

Unfortunately, thoughtfulness in seamless passenger experience appears to have been lacking, and even with a digital boarding card, you’ll need to go to an automated baggage kiosk to print out and affix your bag tags – but unlike Aer Lingus, these kiosks merely print out the bag tags, not weight the bag. So when you reach the front of the line at the actual baggage drop, only then will you find out if your bag is overweight or not.

This caught two passengers out during our check-in, and seems like a disruptive step that would be much better handled at the bag tag printing kiosks instead.

Nevertheless, we were able to drop our bags, grab a few iced coffee’s from McDonalds, and make our way to the intra-Borneo security area, which had no queue and saw us through and heading back up the escalator into the main departure concourse again in no time.

We wound up not having too long to wait before boarding was called and were quickly packed onto our waiting AirAsia A320 for what was announced as being a grand total flying time of just 25 minutes.

Take-off gave us some spectacular views of the morning sunrise as we departed out over the coast, before turning back inland to cut across the Bornean mainland.

With that, the crew sped to work, dispatching pre-booked meals with lightning efficiency. We had ordered a meal each (included with our fare) and while I wrote more about it on my in-flight dining blog (here), it was overall quite delicious despite the ridiculous hour of the morning to be trying to eat a roast chicken dinner; let alone the need to gulp it down as fast as possible due to our incredibly short flight time.

I had barely managed to pack the food away before we began our descent with enthusiasm.

Once again, our left-hand side seating afforded some wonderful views out over the rainforests and the Kinabatangan river as we lessened the gap between ourselves and the ground.

In no time at all, just a few moments after 7am, we were back on terra firma, and connected up to the airport and ready to disembark.

Sandakan Airport – at least the arrivals area – is not large by any stretch and after following a corridor directly from the aircraft, we were promptly stood by one of the several baggage belts and the glass arrivals area.

Overall, I was quite impressed; for a low-cost flight early in the morning, it did everything it needed to do – got us where we needed to be, on-time, and with probably the fastest meal service I’ve ever seen in my life. Unfortunately, the return back to KL would not go quite as smoothly…