BA flights were good as always. Onboard service almost always really nice. And I love the LHR T5 first class lounge. Sadly, looks like I've not quite flown enough this membership year to retain my coveted "gold" status, so no more first class lounge for me. Oh well. In related news, T5 still sucks. Although arriving in T3 was crazy -- that terminal's a bit of a madhouse now. I hear good things about T4 now, but of course it's difficult to get there because the express train doesn't stop. Maybe it's easier to say that LHR is pants.
In Tokyo I used both Narita and Haneda. Haneda is approximately 1700 miles closer to Tokyo than is Narita. Quick little international terminal there, great stuff. Everything about HKG is as good as I remember. I did get to use the Cathay lounge for the first time, which was actually kind of dull. It was smallish, and all table service (or chair services I suppose). I prefer self-serve, but if the waiters want to keep grabbing me glasses of fizzy water, I guess that's fine. I left the lounge early and wandered around the airport a bit. One shop I liked was sponsored by the local trade association and featured solely Hong Kong designers. Lots of phone cases but some interesting other things as well.
Cathay flights were predictably really nice. One feature I loved: an outside camera view (underside of plane, facing forward). Very cool while landing.
Mumbai airport. Well, not sure I can describe it accurately. Waited on the tarmac a while after parking, after a flight in Sing Air that was of course super nice. Exited onto bus. Immediately (seriously, fewer than 10 meters away) upon going through passport control, had to queue up again to have someone verify that my passport was stamped. Why? Do they not trust the people who just stamped them? That sets the tone. More queues, scans, checks. Leaving was even worse. New form and long queues just for immigration control while leaving. Why? Why do they care who leaves? Then umpteen security checks. Noisy place. At the boarding gate, between queuing up to get on the plane and actually getting on the plane, the security tag on my carryon and my boarding pass were checked no fewer than 5 times (5, *after* arriving at the gate), including a rescan and search. In one of the earlier security lines, I did accidentally bodycheck a soldier with an interesting-looking automatic weapon. He was very polite and apologetic, even. I shudder to think what would have happened I'd done the same in a US airport. So in general, despite a very, very short time, there, the thing I noticed about anything, such as the airport, less than pleasant about Mumbai: it would be a thousand times worse except most everyone is so darned good natured. So mostly it's just fine and I end up chastising myself not to be an asshole.
Hotels? Stereotypically, the standard of service at hotels in each leg of my Asia trip was just fantastic. As with airports, really puts western experience to shame. Mumbai hotels take security very seriously, as you might guess. (Is there some rule about having a really impressive-looking Sikh manning the final security check at the front door of every hotel there? Seriously, each hotel I went to had a large, super-relaxed-and-friendly-because-he's-probably-a-stupendous-badass smiling arrivals into the metal detector.) In any case, every hotel on my trip seemed to take service very seriously. Although the Tokyo Hotel could have done with less bowing, more wifi. And let's just say the Hong Kong Mandarin Oriental won the overall prize for awesomeness.
6 comments:
"I shudder to think what would have happened I'd done the same in a US airport." ... or had you been carrying a Pakistani pass port.
5 times from gate to plane matches what I've found in Bangalore.
It's good that you avoided most meat dishes, as they often include cleaver-hacked sharp bone shards - which are unpleasant for the gums.
I'm glad to hear you made it back home well, safe, and sound!
along with Cathay, Air France's AB 330s and 340s have the outside cam feature. It's kinda nice, but I think on AF they "enhance" it - it's not a raw video feed to the passengers (perhaps to the cockpit it is?) sine sometimes clouds and things are "removed" from the 'live' image - unless it's some kind of IR based imagery.
I am curious is the Cathay feed IS 100% authentic, or if it had similar enhancements?
I'm skeptical about any "enhancements" even being possible, if you're talking about live, dymanic, image-editing on a realtime video feed. Removing a cloud would take a lot more sophistication than, say, digitally painting a first down marker on a football field. If what you saw didn't seem to correlate with the outside, I'd say either it was canned footage or it was from a camera pointing in a non-obvious direction (e.g. aft-facing).
The planes I was on were 777s, and the shot from outside was definitely real. A bit dull much of the time since it was the underside of the plane facing forward, but very cool on landing.
no no, I am not saying it was manually enhanced. What I observed on the AF 330 and 340 were images that were spectrally shifted, near IR perhaps, where clouds visible from windows that appeared as blankets were not present on the "downward" or "google-map-ish" perspective. On landing, it was cool to see the gear come down dynamically, and the nose gear wheel accelerate from 0 to 120 mph in 1 second, so I doubt it was 'canned footage'.
Boeing 777s are excellent planes, IMHO. Cavernous over-heads. Non-cramped bath rooms. Personalized media. I wish I could fly them more.
Well, much of the quality of the interior of the plane depends on the carrier. Personalised media, for example, is not a boeing thing per se. I've been on 777 economy seats with nothing, and on 777 state of the art first class seats with everything, and lots in between. I think the manufacturers get too much credit or blame for the "niceness" of a plane when "niceness" mostly just means the interior. That said, internal size and shape matters, things such as the toilets are less configurable than seats, and there are other aspects that definitely are controlled by the manufacturer. The new 787 has, I think, fewer configurations, or more standardisation across seats expected between carriers. It also has more headroom, bigger windows, and is pressurised at a lower effective altitude. All of which is very cool. Personally, I like aesthetics as well. The 777 looks really nice. The 747 is beautiful. I love flying on 747s just because they're cool. But given the choice between an all-business-class 757 or coach on a 747, yeah, I'd probably choose the former.
Add to the unpleasantness of a 757, the AB319, the BAE Arvo RJ (especially the seats under the wings that have 1/2 a shoulder less of room when sitting next to large Germans enroute to Leipzig), any Korean air Air Bus (that is poorly climate controlled and cramped, and doomed to circle endlessly over southern Japanese airports waiting to land), and any McDonnell Douglas or Boeing aircraft in coach run by a Chinese national carrier who have accounted for shorter average height of Chinese citizens compared to protein raised Americans.
I have heard wonderful things about the 787 - il faut voir. The carbon fiber construction - and the inherent manufacturing & inspection difficulties therein - still have me a little skeptical. I share you admiration of 747 aesthetics. I've been in the middle-of-8 in a Korean Air 747 on a Domestic Seoul/Pusan flight - thank goodness it was only 40 minutes long!
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