Updated on August 17, 2017
Flight Log of Qatar Airways Flight 891 / 149 from Hangzhou to Madrid via Doha on January 31st, 2017
With a luxurious 5-week winter holiday that could probably be my last, and with round-trip flights to Europe as low as 39XX CNY (It seemed that Qatar Airway’s year-round sale had never ended, and I was quite amazed to find such fares departing only three days from the Chinese New Year, and from my hometown Hangzhou), I planned another trip to Europe, with some good friend back to ninth grade.
Previously, I had 16 flights in and out of my home town’s airport, all of which were domestic. Now, I could add its “international departure” to my achievements list.
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It’s a Chinese airport and it’s a wide-body jet, so predictably there were huge lines at the check-in, luckily not many people were waiting at the online-check-in-fast-bag-drop lines. So we ended up with loads of time to kill at the departure hall.
Also, since Hangzhou Airport only had a tiny International terminal for its flight volumes, and Qatar’s A332 would stay there for like 8 hours, predictably it’s a shuttle bus ride to the apron.
Dinner wasn’t served until 60 minutes into the flight, which was very typical of Qatar Airways. But as usual, I always found myself quite enjoying their meals.
Then I slept all the way till breakfast was served, which was like 2 hours before landing, a little bit too early in my opinion as one could still take a nap even after all the food trays were retrieved.
After that, it was an uneventful transfer at Doha. One thing to mention, since our connecting flight departed from Concourse D which was far from transit screening, we got to experience Doha Airport’s ever-empty tram.
Having boarded the plane, I was exploring Qatar Airways B787’s onboard entertainment system and found this game that didn’t require the ABXY buttons (with appalling feel and awful delays in any other aircraft I had previously been on). Maybe it’s a better idea Qatar Airways set up things like leaderboard, and, send out miles to the weekly leader?
Yes, it’s a Boeing 787 with its disgusting electronically-dimmed windows, so I weren’t taking a lot of photos along the way. Guess had Qatar Airways offered two B787 segments and I would instead opted for Aeroflot.
On the same plane were some FCB junior team coming home after winning some soccer champions. No, they won’t be the famous Barcelona Club (as otherwise they would sit in Business), so my best guesses were FCB junior or FCB backup, things like that, as they were all wearing FCB uniforms.
But since I didn’t care about the soccer world at all, let there be guesses.
After we touched down at Madrid Airport, under the trypophobia-bamboo-roof we found that immigration was thronged with people. To make matters worse, the Madrid Airport Wifi seemed to be discriminating against my Android devices by asking me to do surveys (that I could not actually submit) first and surf the internet later, while my friend’s iPad was enjoying smooth network connection all the time.
END
Flight Log of Qatar Airways Flight 891 / 149 from Hangzhou to Madrid via Doha on January 31st, 2017 by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.