in reply to Perl hashes revisit

It appears as though $test->{dest} is a hash of NetPacket::TCP objects keyed on some id that, as you've noticed, varies, so, given that $test->{dest}->{num} is a hash ref., in order to see the flags for all dest's, try...
foreach my $num (keys %{ $test->{dest} } ) { print "$num: " . $test->{dest}->{$num}->flags(); }

A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))