I usually fly on United Airlines, but today I ended up booked on ANA from San Francisco to Tokyo. I haven’t tried ANA in several years, so it was interesting to see how their service compared. On this trip I was also upgraded to business class at the last minute as the flight was oversold in coach. This flight was on a 777-200.
Liked the external TV camera on the in-flight entertainment system. These days it’s rare to get a view through the cockpit of a US-flagged commercial airplane, and I enjoyed seeing the view out the front rather than the side. There seem to be two cameras, one pointing forward, which is shown during takeoff, approach, and landing, and another downward facing camera for the rest. Most of the time it’s not very interesting (endless cloud banks or open ocean), but I did see a couple of other airliners well below us as we approached Japan.
The in-flight entertainment system is similar the IFE on Singapore Airlines, which is slightly nicer than the UA system. It provides individual programming to each seat, with a selection of on-demand movies, audio, and Nintendo video games. It’s nice to pause, fast forward, and rewind the movies. There are more movie choices than on UA, but fewer than on SQ. Also, the video game library is smaller than on SQ and does not include any Pokemon titles, which might be important to some.
At various points, I watched parts of : After the Sunset, Fistful of Dollars, Batman Returns, Million Dollar Baby, Lemony Snicket, Shall We Dance, Officer and a Gentleman, a video about Paris, Japanese music videos, and a Japanese version of VH1 showing US videos from the 80’s.
The audio programming includes “Premier Nature Sound 1 & 2″, which are “In the Raining Forest”, and “Relaxation Bird”. Both feature falling water and bird sounds.
I walked back in coach to see how things were set up, and each seat has its own display in the seatback in front of it, similar to SQ. The business class displays are slightly larger and swing up from the front of the seat. Interestingly, there are also CRT monitors overhead and a projection display at the front of the cabin, which show either the exterior camera view or the airshow map most of the time.
The business class headphones are more or less standard issue airline headphones, no noise reduction. I didn’t use them, as I carry my own (Sony MDR-NC20).
No passenger amenity kit, although ANA does supply slippers and blankets for each seat. There are also toothbrushes and other items available near the bathrooms.
The business class seats are OK but not great. They don’t recline as far as the UA business seats, and don’t have personal reading lights. They also don’t have the automatic lumbar support cycling mechanism. On the plus side, they’re reasonably comfortable, have a decent amount of cushion, and adequate legroom (for me). Despite the individualized IFE, there’s a reasonable amount of storage space under the seat in front of you, which is also handy if you’re in the middle row (which I was).
No hot nuts after takeoff. I brought my own snacks though.
The food was OK. I got a beef entree which was kind of tough, but some of the random Japanese side items were different and good.
They handed out bottles of water to everyone who wanted one, which was convenient. They also brought replacements promptly without having to hunt down a flight attendent. I got the impression that there were more crew on this flight than on a typical UA flight.
ANA is in Terminal 2 at Narita, while the UA flight I’m connecting to is in Terminal 1. So I got to take the shuttle bus from Terminal 2 to Terminal 1, which I haven’t done for a while. There weren’t any other passengers from Terminal 2 heading toward the shuttle stop at the time, so there was no line for the security rescreening. This was nice, since usually there’s a huge line for the security checkpoint for connecting flights within Terminal 1. I waited less than a minute for the shuttle, and the actual ride takes around 5 minutes. The shuttle drops you off at Gate 28, airside, so you don’t have to go through security again.
Now I’m back at the United Red Carpet Club in Terminal 1, which conveniently provides free (and massively insecure) wireless. There’s also at least a couple of misconfigured notebooks around somewhere, as I keep getting IP address conflict warnings. Not a place to run an unpatched system.
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on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 12:46 am and is filed under Travel.
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June 14th, 2007 at 1:11 am
This one makes sence “One’s first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything - and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”