Musings from a Plane

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I’m writing this from a comically empty A350 over North East India, nearing the Bangladeshi border. Of course it’s the middle of the night local time so it’s dark and there’s nothing particularly to see. As you may have guessed from the title and from the content so far, I don’t really have a tremendous amount to say yet so this will largely be a pointless post. Content-light let’s call it so just skip this post completely if you’re not interested.

Back to the comically empty then, I think the adequately describes the state of the plane. I would say about a tenth to maybe a sixth of seats have passengers in them, it’s ridiculous. Every single person on the plane has a group of 3 seats to themselves (it’s a 3-3-3 configuration plane so there’s no point taking up more than three) and there are still numerous blocks of 3 seats empty. I don’t know how they’re operating this plane at anything close to profitable, I hope for the airline’s sake that it’s a full flight on the way back (and so that the route doesn’t get cancelled before my return flight in September). I’m fairly certain that there are fewer passengers on this widebody A350 from Helsinki to Bangkok – I’m flying Finnair and transited in Helsinki by the way, probably should have mentioned that earlier – than there were on the regional Embraer 190 on the hour and a half Warsaw to Helsinki leg with its 2-2 configuration and about 20 rows. I can be fairly certain in that, because there was only one bus taking all the passengers off the first plane (which was a completely full flight as far as I could tell) and one bus bringing all the passengers onto the second flight and the bus boarding the Bangkok flight seemed emptier.

Just to quickly delve into the flights themselves, both the A350 and E190 were new aircraft for me, and it’s always nice to try a new aircraft. Finnair was a new airline too and I’m quite impressed by how nicely done the cabins are and the very attractive livery. The Embraer 190 Regional Jet was particularly nice, so much more comfortable than a B737 or A320. I know, they’re fairly different planes and most of my experience with the latter two has been on budget carriers – so I’m comparing apples and oranges – but they’re both still fruit so I think the comparison stands. The E-jet feels much more comfortable and much roomier than a 737 or 320. I can’t really make a comparison about the A350, it certainly feels nice and roomy with a whole row to myself. I think A350s look particularly cool from the outside with the sunglasses look, possibly the nicest looking commercial aircraft in operation (and great with the Finnair livery), and they may well be extremely efficient, but there’s nothing particularly special about them from a passenger perspective I don’t think.

My transit in Helsinki was very quick, it was supposed to be an hour and 50 minutes, but it was cut down to about an hour gate-to-gate because we were delayed taking off from Warsaw. It may have had something to do with a US Air Force C17 that was taxiing around and then took off before us. It was clearly not a normal occurrence because all the airport ground staff were taking pictures of it.

And I just finally want to add that Ubik by Philip K Dick is a really good book. Really good. I liked <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, also by Dick, very much when doing it as a text in Literature lessons at school but Ubik is possibly even better. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book which I started this morning on the flight from Warsaw to Helsinki and I may finish it on this flight if I don’t manage to get back to sleep. I’ve managed about 4 hours sleep so far, which is more than I normally would get on a flight. Having three seats to yourself helps. But yeah, Ubik. Great book.

There is wifi available on board the flight, but you’ve got to pay for it and I’m not doing that just to post this rather meandering ramble of a blog post so I’ll be posting this from Bangkok.

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Comments

[Frances]

Empty planes
May there be many more empty flights on your trip. Every travellers dream. Good luck on your first stop!