Review of Singapore Airlines flight Chennai → Singapore in Economy

Introduction

Me reviewing Singapore Airlines is starting to get a bit repetitive, but the fact remains that I had four flights with them in 2022, of which two have been published so far as of March 2023, a 787-10 in January 2022 and an A350-900 in October — which, if you’ve been reading my past reports, you will know was operated by that iconic and one-in-ten-thousand specimen: NinerVictor-SierraMikeFoxtrot. No. 3, the flight I am going to talk about now, was virtually identical to that first one in January: same aircraft (787-10), same route (Chennai to Singapore), almost the same seat (66K then, 68K now), mostly the same flight number (SQ527 as against SQ529), similar departure and arrival times (late at night to early in the morning, except this landed well after day broke), and so on and so forth. (No. 4, for the record, was on the regional A350 to Bangkok in December.) You may ask: What’s the point of reviewing the same product again, and on the same route?

Well, let me tell you that despite all the similarities, there were still some differences: (a) Singapore’s concept of ‘VTL’ (Vaccinated Travel Lane) flights had, thankfully, long been scrapped; (b) this came on the heels of the Diwali break, one of India’s biggest cultural festivities involving plenty of lights and fireworks; and © there were a couple of quirks and incidents that you don’t see every day. Yes, this was a far less momentous flight for me than the one to Kuala Lumpur (repeat after me: NinerVictor-SierraMikeFoxtrot) and the one from Kuala Lumpur (#FirstOnMH #FirstA330), which you can read up yourself, if you please, before coming here. But no matter how small, I will still give this flight its due space and share my experience on it. Rest assured, this one will be completely shorn of my infamous snark and puns, instead presenting the facts as they are! 

Brief note on SQ’s Indian routes for summer 2023

This comes as SQ has started flying the A350 Regional to Chennai (MAA), at least temporarily, starting from 11 March 2023 — in place of the nearly twice-daily 787-10s (SQ’s second-biggest aircraft after the A380 by capacity) that are usually used on the route — making it the first time it has ever flown Airbus aircraft to MAA since the A330-300 was retired. In addition, SQ has reintroduced the A350 to Kolkata (CCU) in eastern India with the start of the summer schedful; while the A350 few there daily prepandemic, since 2022 it was operated only by the 737 MAX, though now it is split between 3x weekly A350 and 4x weekly 737 MAX service.

Typically the SQ A350 Regional flies to Ahmedabad (AMD) 5x weekly, Bengaluru (BLR) daily (plus an additional weekend service 2x weekly, SQ512/513), Mumbai (BOM) daily on the morning service — since it’s the A380 for the evening flight — and, since 30 October 2022, Hyderabad (HYD) 4x weekly, with the other three days on the 737 MAX (a reversal of Kolkata’s 4x 737 MAX, 3x A350). In addition, Mumbai also gets the long-haul A350 (9V-SM*) for a 2x weekly weekend SQ425/426 service, the only Indian city to get it.

Now that SQ also flies the A350 to Chennai and Kolkata — the two major Indian airports which seem to be perpetually stuck under government control instead of reaping the benefits of privatisation — six out of its eight Indian destinations receive the A350 Regional, except Kochi (COK) — another southern city, which gets twice-daily 737 MAX service — and the capital Delhi (DEL), which has a morning 787-10 service and a nightly A380 service (upgraded from the 777-300ER at least for some summer months, before the peak summer period when SQ will send more A380s to London at Delhi’s expense).

Similarly, five out of eight Indian cities receive the 737 MAX: BLR (6x weekly morning), CCU (4x weekly night, formerly daily), COK (twice daily night), HYD (3x weekly night) and MAA (4x weekly morning), since AMD, BOM and DEL are too far from Singapore to be served by the narrowbody. In India the A380 serves BOM and now DEL, replacing the 777-300ER for the latter, while the 787-10 serves only DEL as of now, until it is reintroduced for MAA — if and when that happens.

Diwali festivities

In my sprawling apartment complex located beside a major shopping mall in Chennai, the festival of Deepavali or Diwali was celebrated unfettered and with gay abandon, after two pandemic-restricted years of social distancing and barely any merriment at all. Here I publish a handful of pictures showing people in their festive finery and technicoloured pyrotechnics lighting up the night. It is only very rarely that I use the Gallery feature, which I have here.

The airport, too, was decorated in colourful festooned lights, as is the norm on festive occasions. We reached at around 11:15pm, and fortunately there were none of the security shenanigans that marked my worst flight back in June.

The check-in counters were thronged by passengers on Thai Airways and Singapore Airlines, which despite being in the same alliance have little to no cooperation with each other.

My journal was highly simplistic in this case — aside from the registration of the inbound aircraft — but the following evening I wrote a much more detailed entry, given that it was the 15th anniversary of the A380! I have included it at the end, along with my journal entries for the Restaurant A380@Changi experience two years previously.

Before long I had my boarding pass and proceeded for security.

The duty-free shops weren’t branded with the name of the city, unlike what you have at private Indian airports (Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, etc. Duty Free). The fact that a government-run airport had a duty-free shop was itself unexpected.

But the tiny bookshop (‘Sash’) was completely in line with a shoddy state-run airport; though the selection of books (and other gifts) was decent, the upkeep and presentation was very 1980s, and not in a good way. And yet WHSmiths and Relays are present at not only private airports (DEL, BOM, BLR, HYD, AMD) but also state-run ones like Kolkata (CCU) and Pune (PNQ). Chennai only has a branch of the Higginbothams bookstore (a centuries-old establishment on Mount Road, in a good way!), but only in the domestic terminal, as the international terminal has to make do with this apology of a bookshop instead of a proper WHSmith, where you can also buy chocolates or small electronics, rather than ancient artifacts that are out of place for a modern airport.

Going down a level into the ancient part of the international terminal, one came across the Martini Lounge, which was a good break from the drab surroundings.

I had a small midnight snack consisting of a croissant, a sandwich, a macaroon and a bottle of aloe-vera lemonade from the nearby kiosk. This is about all you can expect at this time of day and from this airport management. No KFC to be found here, unlike in the far better domestic terminal!

The array of juices was attractive and appetising, but also a tad expensive.

At around 12:45am passengers were invited to board SQ527, and at the same time the neighbouring gate’s AF108 to Paris already had a long and healthy queue.

Having arrived at around midnight as SQ526 — this operates every night of the week except Tuesday night/Wednesday morning — 9V-SCL was ready and waiting to take me back to my land of work. A lot had changed since I last boarded an SQ 787-10 from Chennai at night.

The flight

Flight: Singapore Airlines SQ527/SIA527
Date: Tuesday, 25 October 2022
Route: Chennai (VOMM/MAA) to Singapore (WSSS/SIN)
Aircraft: 9V-SCL, Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner
Age: 3.3 years at the time (first flight: 7 June 2019, delivered: 23 June 2019)
Seat: 68K (window)
Boarding: pm IST, UTC +5:30
Departure: 1:35am IST, UTC +5:30 (4:05am SGT)
Arrival: 7:50am SGT, UTC +8 (5:20am IST)
Duration: 3 hours 45 minutes

Notes:
* Second flight on the 787-10, and fourth on the 787 overall, after SQ529 in January 2022 and two Air India 787-8 flights in 2018 and 2021.
* Third flight on Singapore Airlines, after SQ529 in January and SQ126 in October 2022. 

On the jetbridge, each economy passenger was invited to take a (reusable) bag of earphones — a nice gesture.

Meanwhile, HS-TWB (one of two 787-9s at Thai Airways, which frequently come to MAA) was parked at the next gate. Little did I know that I would be arriving again in Chennai on this exact aircraft in two months’ time; the inbound TG337 in December was as joyous — replete with rainbow mood lighting — as the outbound TG338 in June was dreadful. For the record, never once did I fly either the same registration or the same flight number in 2022, a streak that has continued into 2023!

The trademark Singapore Girl greeted passengers as they settled into their seats. I do wish, however, that SQ hadn’t chosen the clichéd and disappointing Montserrat font for its IFE system, but instead learnt from airlines that use ONLY their corporate font in their IFE: think Qantas, Finnair, Malaysia Airlines, Qatar Airways and Cathay Pacific. (Wait, those are from a different alliance… how about SAS, Air New Zealand, Austrian and Avianca instead?)

Yes, SQ does use its signature Baker Signet here, but was there a need to go all plebeian with Montserrat, especially as this is the airline which launched its ‘Welcome to Word Class’ campaign two months ago?

The dark grey seatback of the 787-10, coupled with the black-and-blue seat fabrics, which I am not a fan of. Yes, the A350 Regional also has this pitiful upholstery, but it has a far better IFE system (from Thales) which no other aircraft does. Regardless, I strongly prefer the white seatback of the A350 Longhaul. Then again, the A350 Longhaul does not extend to 69 rows like the A350 Regional or 75 like the 787-10 — I love high row numbers towards the back of the plane.

A pillow and blanket were also provided, which not every airline can guarantee. 

This IFE system was a good one for multilingualists, with most major languages in Southeast Asia covered, plus Hindi and Tamil — a far more region-specific selection (with Deutsch and Français being the only European languages) than Thai Airways, which also has Italian but not most Southeast Asian languages. In any case, this is much better than Malaysia Airlines on the somewhat outdated A330-300, where the choice is between Bahasa Melayu and Inggeris.

For some reason, the seat in front (67K) had something scrawled on it, which looked like ’67K HN’.

There was an inflight Wi-Fi guide, which I could not connect to — whether or not we were flying over Indian airspace (where Panasonic Wi-Fi works, but not SITA OnAir) — as has always been the case on Singapore Airlines. My luck with Wi-Fi on Emirates (and, more recently, Vistara from Singapore to Mumbai) has been better.

Soon enough HS-TWB had lifted off for Thailand.

Meanwhile there was another 787-9 to our left: F-HRBB of Air France. The aircraft operating AF108 has changed over the months (with the return to CDG being either AF115 or AF121), from the newer 787-9 and 777-300ER to the older A330-200 and 777-200ER. Similar is the case with AF191/194 (or AF203/204) to Bengaluru, though it also receives the A350 on occasion, which MAA hardly ever gets — if at all — from any airline until SQ started in March 2023.

This safety video (yes, the epitome of relaxation and tranquility) had something special that I had never seen before on any SQ flight to India: Hindi subtitles. Some boarding announcements were even made in Hindi, despite Chennai not being a very Hindi-speaking city — it speaks Tamil, which is also one of four official languages of Singapore (and Malaysia). I wonder how this is enforced on SQ flights to other Indian cities.

I briefly turned to the IFE selection, and the respectable number of Indian movies (both Hindi and otherwise) on offer. While KrisWorld continues to be regarded as one of the world’s best IFE systems, I disagree, as it comes up woefully short of Emirates’ ice system in terms of the sheer vastness of the latter. Still, it should be more than enough choice for anyone on any duration of flight.

At 1:35am the 787-10 lifted off, her brushwing providing a contrast to the arches of the terminal, there being no winglet to serve that purpose.

There were some popular recent Indian hits on offer, with Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 being one of the very rare Hindi films to succeed in 2022, as the year was otherwise dominated by South Indian action/historical movies like RRR, KGF: Chapter 2 and Kantara. 2021, being a much more pandemic-curtailed year, had a similar story, with Sooryavanshi the only success Bollywood had to offer; the much-hyped sports biopic 83 fell flat, pummelled as it was by another Southern actioner, Pushpa: The Rise. (2023 has proven to be different so far, with Bollywood’s monster hit Pathaan raking in over ₹1,000 crore, or $130 million, making it one of the highest-grossing Indian movies ever — though not as much as RRR, a far more global hit, whose Naatu Naatu song won an Oscar!)

Then I turned to the music selection and put on a rousing track by none other than Hans Zimmer.

Soon enough, the meal on this night flight was served. Now — at cruising altitude — is about the only time when you’ll willingly have dinner at three in the morning. The flight attendant serving our aisle was a girl named Paige Chiam. She was about as Singapore Girl as it gets: courteous, drop-dead gorgeous but also a little robotic.

As with the January flight, the options consisted of a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian dish, I having chosen the latter. This time around it was Mutton Chettinad with Green Peas and Brown Onion Pulao, a delectable choice, with the dessert being a butterscotch cake — and I am a diehard sucker for anything butterscotch.

The usual accompaniments were all there: dry bread roll, Amul butter (probably the only Indian butter there is), Amul whitener, Bisleri bottled water and metal cutlery to boot. Not the most memorable meal, though a decent and filling one, but definitely a memorable dessert. If only subsidiary Vistara served proper cakes like this (and the purple ones on TG) instead of the awful chemical-smelling pudding I had some days ago from Singapore to Mumbai…

This was the meal for this flight, which I only looked up well after landing. (You couldn’t see the menu for a completed flight, but you could see the next day’s menu, which was no different from this one.) Afterwards, I did mention the meal in my small tribute on the A380’s 15th anniversary later that night, which I have included at the end.

Meanwhile, my inflight entertainment was an article I had written for an Indian television news website on the mega-rebrand of the Sony network, one of the largest TV broadcasters in India, with new logos and graphics for all of its channels that were introduced at midnight on Diwali. Notice the consistent usage of the Proxima Nova font everywhere: in the Singapore Airlines menu, in the header of the article below, by Sony Pictures Networks itself.

It goes without saying that it is one of my favourite fonts, and in fact I consider it to be one of the most trustworthy and dependable out there. No surprise, then, that this is what I have chosen as my username on not only Flight-Report but also several other sites. (Yes, fonts are like people, with various personalities!)

Arrival

It didn’t take long for the light to filter through on this flight, and before long we were flying over Malaysia with sunny clouds for company.

As we commenced descent, KrisWorld showed a reminder for passengers not to forget their belongings, which I have not seen on other airlines.

At 7:50am local time the Dreamliner put her wheels down at my adopted home of Singapore Changi Airport, with a Batik Air 737 (PK-LBZ) for company. Too bad the Lion Group’s full-service airline uses only 737s for all its international operations, confining the A320 to domestic Indonesian flights. This is one of few airlines worldwide to operate both A320 and 737 family aircraft but no widebodies; Russia’s S7 Airlines and Turkey’s Pegasus Airlines also come to mind. In the background was also an Air New Zealand 787 (ZK-NZC).

There was a most interesting announcement: ’Ladies and gentlemen, paging passenger Mr Prabhakaran Angel connecting on SQ906 to Cebu. If you are present on this fliht please identify yourself to a member of the cabin crew. Thank you.’ Such announcements I typically voice-record, but this time I did not have the time.

Presumably the passenger had a very tight connection, which was incidentally on SQ’s only triangular flight: the same flight number is used from Singapore to Davao, to Cebu, and back to Singapore. 

HSBC ads, with their aspirational messaging, are on every jetbridge at Changi, and I write this at a time when my father — who is nearing retirement — is putting the finishing touches on his long financial career by making the switch to what once dubbed itself ‘the world’s local bank’. (This entails shifting base from Chennai, where we’ve lived for two decades, to Bengaluru — which isn’t as rosy as it sounds. BLR might have the better airport by a country mile, but is greatly pegged back by the far worse condition of the roads and general chock-a-block, gasping-for-breath infrastructure. Having visited a few days ago in search of new lodgings, I can attest to that.)

Before long I was out, and stared at Charlie Lima enjoying sunning herself in the clear day.

A board had been put up for the passenger who was connecting to Cebu.

Meanwhile an Air India A320neo had arrived from Mumbai as AI342, and was preparing for the morning AI347 flight to Chennai, which I took several times in 2019 but have no intention to do so again — not on such a product, devoid as it is of inflight entertainment, and hence no better than IndiGo’s 6E52 afternoon option, where you will often find friendlier service.

In October 2022, not that many airlines had moved back to T2, and hence almost all the departures were on SQ — specifically, within Southeast Asia — with the only exceptions being on Air India (Express) in the morning and evening.

Waiting at an adjacent gate was VT-ANP, a 787 with a motif of Indian icon Mohandas Gandhi on the tail, to commemorate his 150th birth anniversary that took place in 2019. Two other aircraft have this decal: VT-CIO, an A320neo, and VT-SCS, an A319.

AI uses the 787-8 only for the daytime AI380/381 DEL–SIN rotation, while the nighttime AI382/383 and the BOM–SIN–MAA–SIN–BOM rotation (AI342/347/346/343) uses the pitiful A320neo instead. During the ‘air bubble’ period until March 2022, however, the latter rotation got the 787 instead. In any case, there is hardly any reason you should fly AI when you have the far superior SQ product (or Vistara, to Delhi, Mumbai and Pune). I hope the onboard product is looked into once Air India swallows Vistara whole and the latter ceases to exist.

As I left, 9V-SCL continued to prepare for her next flight, which I believe was SQ938 to Denpasar.

There were a few duty-free shops under construction. Changi has no local duty-free shops, with all of them operated by either Korean companies (Shilla and Lotte) or international ones like Dufry.

The next hurdle was the immigration section, where as always I breezed through, this time with my new employment pass.

Just how much T2 had revamped itself was evident in the baggage collection section, which must be the most cutting-edge in the world.

Soon enough I was out the airport on the clean, empty roads of Singapore in a Grab taxi, a stark contrast from the exuberant, noisy Indian roads which I love more.

I slept through most of the day, there being no work assigned yet. Later at night I penned a beautiful piece on the 15th anniversary of the A380. (Note: I didn’t account for China Southern’s retirement of the A380, though I did know that Etihad might bring it back.)

And this was my account of the Restaurant A380@Changi experience exactly two years prior, during the pandemic-curtailed events of 2020, when SQ was desperate to generate some interest on the ground while it couldn’t in the air. I do hope I can actually fly the superjumbo some time soon, be it on SQ, EK, QF, QR or anyone else, as who knows whether or not it will last into the 2030s and beyond.