Flight Log of Delta Airlines Flight 5682 from Washington Reagan to Boston

by admin

Towards the end of April 2024, I made two trips to Boston for some personal errands. This post would cover the only flight worth mentioning, on the morning of April 24 from Washington DC to Boston.

Overlooking National Mall

Ticketing

Towards the end of April 2024, I had some personal errands to run in Boston. I first flew to Boston on Wednesday April 17, and then back on the next day on April 18. Unfortunately, that turned out to be not enough, so I made another day trip the next Wednesday, flying both out and back on April 24.

On both dates, when flying back from Boston to Washington DC, I found American Airlines offered award spaces on the last flight of the day, departing Boston at 8:35pm. While planning, I found a few instances that this flight was severely delayed, so that I wouldn’t make it onto the last metro home. Luckily, on both dates this flight was largely on time.
With award spaces available, I ticketed the flight on April 18 using 8250 British Airways Avios, almost depleting one of my (household) avios accounts. For the flight on April 24, I used 4500 Alaska Airlines points (plus a $12.5 partner award fee). This pair was the complete opposite of airline award spectrum, British Airways has been steadily devaluing their award points throughout the last few years, while Alaska Airlines with its recently revamped award charts turned out to have a sweet spot on short-range flight redemption.

One thing to note, both British Airways and Alaska Airlines required passengers on award tickets issued by them to initially have their frequent flyer program (FFP) numbers. This can be inconvenient as I wanted to use my American Airlines FFP numbers for certain seat and baggage benefits. With British Airways, this can be easily changed on partner websites such as Finnair (or Qatar, as rumored). On the other hand, Alaska Airlines used a different reservation system so the above trick didn’t work. It’s their policy to not change FFP on their award tickets, but some mentioned it’s possible to ask chat agents to change FFP, with high probabilities of success.

For the flights to Boston, since I only booked a few days in advance, they were both sort of expensive. Of the three major carriers on this route, Delta was the cheapest in both cases, and the flights cost me 170 and 145 USD respectively in Basic Economy. (The week of April 17 was spring break week for many schools in Boston, which sounded sort of late to me, and as a result the flights were very expensive.)

This post would be about my flight on April 24 from Washington DC to Boston, the only noteworthy flight of the four.

The Flight

This was the last time in the foreseeable future that I would depart from Washington DC’s Reagan Airport, one that I had been very familiar with over the past few years. And like most times I departed from it, things went without a hitch.

Here’s GPS tracking:

Delta Airlines 5682 (Operated by Republic Airways as Delta Connect)
Washington Reagan (DCA) – Boston, MA (BOS)
Embraer ERJ175 (N205JQ)
Seat 7D
Scheduled Departure – 8:45am
Actual Departure – 9:09am
Scheduled Arrival – 10:30am
Actual Arrival – 10:09am
1 hour

Here’s a video of the takeoff:

Overlooking National Mall
Overlooking National Mall
Downtown Bethesda
Washington DC

During the flight, I captured the following two photos, one of Greenbelt during departure, one of the shore of Massachusetts Bay during approach. It’s a coincidence that the house I was moving out of, and the house I was moving into were both in these photos.

Greenbelt
Rumney Marsh Reservation

Apart from that, this flight wasn’t very remarkable (except that I couldn’t to Delta’s in-flight WiFi). Delta managed a quick drink service (water/tea/coffee) for this short flight. I recalled American used to offer a proper round of drink service, but probably because it’s late at night, there was no service at all for both of my fights with American on the way back to DC. It’s generally undercast along the way so there’s nothing to show during cruise. In the end, I was treated with views of Revere Beach as we approached the airport from the north.

Here’s a video of the landing: