Review of Air China flight Nanning → Beijing in Economy

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 :/