Hello, welcome to my First Post here on Flight-Report, I'm usually found on airliners.net with the same alias.
We start another wild adventure from the beautiful and green Nanning, Guangxi, China and slowly work our way back to Boise, Idaho in the US. This flight is my first A321 flight so definitely exciting and oh boy, what a wonderful time in Beijing we will have!
Wednesday June 27th, 2018
CA1486
NNG-PEK
Type: Airbus A321-200
Registration: B-6383
Departure: 16:05 (17:01)
Arrival: 19:25 (20:03)
Duration: 03:20 (03:02)
Palm trees near our temporary residence
Last little raw fried noodles
Driving to the Airport
We left at about 13:00 and quickly made it through to the airport, which is about an hour away from near the city center.
Our flight on the FID
Afterwards we checked-in through the very generic check-in area for non-CZ, MU, and GX flights and received our generic boarding passes even through our first connection, which ultimately we never used (yes! we get actual CA boarding passes)
Airside
Interesting carriers at NNG
Gate 43, in the more remote section of NNG where our plane was
West section of NNG
Heavy rainstorm which caused some issues on the ground and delays (galore!)
Eventually boarding began at around 15:50, pretty close to departure time
GX E190 (This is GX's main hub)
The A321 today: B-6383
Seatback pockets and the generic BP
That GX E190 now with its registration showing
Then the series of unfortunate events occurred which was the APU not working, which lead to the cabin rising to a pretty hot 31 Celsius or 88 Fahrenheit for fellow Americans like me.
The engines also had to be manually started too which took around 20 minutes
Free water
The awesome crew interacted well and informed passengers all the prior statements and even poured drinks for the passengers.
Eventually around 16:45 we pushed back with both engines running and chugging.
Never knew Chinese Registrations could have letters after the Bravo Dash (JD A321)
BK B73E
Take off was at 17:01 almost an hour behind schedule
IFE
Crew preparing for service
OJ, one of the things I didn't like was the lack of drink varieties
After the drink service they commenced a hot meal service with a choice of Braised Chicken Meatballs or Fish with Rice
I chose the chicken since I am afraid of the fish having bones as the custom here is to cook fish bone-in
Better look at that IFE
Green tea
In flight magazine (Nice shot Zabivaka!)
Route map
Polluted Beijing
Sunset
Landing at a remote part of PEK
Hainan remote stand
Mahan Air A343
Unfortunately we were directed to runway 36L, which was really far from T3 where CA resides and took another 20 minutes
By the time we reached our gate, D06, it was too late to connect to the next flight to LAX at T3-E, and we needed to be rebooked, on a special plane, the Boeing 747-8i
Anyway we had to be accommodated for the night and of course, we had to be home late 20 hours :/
Great report by the way!
The reason why Chinese registrations now include letters is because they've been running out of registration numbers since the original combination allowed for 9999 aircraft registered in China. (Had they switched with Taiwan, it would have been easier because that combinations allows for 99999 different registrations) For example, China Eastern's first A320neo was registered B-1076, but their most recent one was registered B-301Z. Historically this combination has only been used as test registrations for aircraft built in China before customer delivery.
I see, thanks for clarifying. I see that the aviation business in China has grown quite so much that well they will soon reach over 10000 aircraft, which means well they are gonna need to add letters too, then they can accommodate 1679616 aircraft!