Review of Delta Air Lines flight New Orleans → New York in Economy

Background

This flight was the first flight on my trip to Europe. I routing would look like this: MSY-JFK, JFK-TXL, VIE-CDG, CDG-JFK, JFK-MSY. The first two flights on the way there would be on Delta and so would the last flight on the way back while the other 2 would be on Air France.

At the airport

I live about 2 hours away from MSY in Mississippi, so I left my house around 7 A.M. and arrived at the airport at 9:05 A.M. At this time, the Delta check in counters were empty and so was the airport itself because the morning rush had ended earlier. Security for Terminal D had a small line and a rather mean agent checking ID's but the experience was relatively painless and I was out within 5 minutes.

After arriving at my gate, D8, I decided to look around the terminal for some breakfast options since I still had 45 minutes till I boarded.

Terminal D is the newest terminal at MSY, opening in 1996. It is definitely the cleanest terminal at the airport, considering terminal B feels as if you are in a terminal for a third-world country. Fortunately, New Orleans has been building a new terminal for the last few years and it is currently slated to open in November 2019 but the date is pushed back often so I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't open until 2020.

My flight was arriving from JFK at 10:26 A.M. but it arrived early at 10:06 A.M. I had noticed that this flight often arrives early and sometimes up to 45 minutes early. 

The rotunda of gates in Terminal D (D8-D12) was starting to get quite busy around this time as 4 flights had arrived at the same time. Soon, it was time for boarding. 

I boarded in group Main Cabin 3 and took my seat, 20F soon. I had a good amount of legroom for this flight and the seat came with an outlet along with the latest Delta IFE system.

We took off at 11:05 A.M. Delta had an extensive selection of entertainment options and I decided to watch the movie Greta. It was very good and interesting. I had already brought my own headphones but a flight attendant did pass out some earphones about 20 minutes inflight. 

The flight itself was rather rough with lots of turbulence but it was still a good flight. During the inflight service, I selected a sprite and a bag of Cheese-Itz as my snack. One nice touch was that after this service, the flight attendants passed out cups of water.

We prepared for our descent at 2:20 P.M. ET and it was told to us that we would be arriving at gate C68, rather than B46 which was told to us earlier. This made me worry because I would be spending an almost 6 hour layover in the airport and was hoping to arrive in Terminal B to do some spotting and have more food and shopping options. Google Flights said that my next flight was departing from C65 but the Delta app said nothing about a gate. This worried me because in order to get on the Jitney Bus between Terminals 2 and 4, you must have a flight departing in the destination terminal.

We finally touched down very early at 2:46 P.M. and I was off the plane shortly.