Review of Air France flight from Dubai to Paris in Economy

Finally here comes the return part of my July's trip to Dubaï. The first long haul one I did since the covid crisis.

You can find the report on the KL flight that brought me there.

https://flight-report.com/fr/report/52629/klm-kl427-amsterdam-ams-dubai-dxb

To fly back to Paris, I chose the direct AF flight that departed after midnight, I had a whole day to enjoy the heat and the pool, and went back to the airport with the metro.

The departing flights, with so many flights at horrible hours.

The airport wasn't crowded at all, except at the AFKL counters, but with Skypriority checkin, I was through in 5 minutes after a careful inspection of my PCR test and an oral offer of the upgrade opportunities (220€ for Y+ and 500€ for Business Class)

Immigration was a real hassle, the automatic passport reader did not work for me, and I was sent from counter to counter until some Emirati agent finally stamped my passport without telling me what the issue was.

Then, on to the the shuttle that took us to the non-Emirates terminal

Right after exiting the shuttle the escalator makes you go through the Duty Free which was deserted, and so was the terminal, only a few passenger here and there.

I went to my gate and passed the Swiss A330 I almost flew on before deciding to fly with AFKL instead.

Now if the aiport was deserted, the gates for the CDG and AMS flights, departing within 10 minutes of each other, certainly weren't!

The queues for the 2 flights were not really clearly separated and the identic zone signs for both airlines did not help.

Boarding started on time and priorities were enforced.

Tonight I'd be flying on the gorgeous Skyteam livery 777-300ER F-GZNE.
With the 2 jetways and the reflections, it was hard to get a good shot though :-(

The greeting onboard was friendly, I passed the Business and Premium Economy sections on the way to my seat.

My seat was 40A, the row immediately behind the emergency exit.
Seats had a blanket, pillow and headphones. KL discontinued the pillow for some reason.

Loads in Business and Y+ seem pretty low, hence the upgrade offers, but economy class ended up being almost completely full.
Dubaï being one of the only open destination for tourism clearly showed!

Our blue neighbour, as often AF and KL are parked together at outstations.

Pitch was ok, certainly not great. and there was no magazine taking uo space in the seat pocket.

The IFE was the latest version, with a great moving map with several views to choose from and perfectly detailed aircraft.

The safety video was the newest one, highlighting French culture, Paris, the Opera, the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the French Riviera and so on.
I found it very nice, even if a bit cliché.

We pushed back on time, traffic was still limited, at what used to be a peak hour at DXB.

Our mighty engines groaned and screamed as they were started in the usual 77W fashion.

After a quick taxi, we took off

Unfortunately I was on the wrong side to see Dubaï downtown, but as we turned north, I was able to clearly see the Burj al Arab hotel and the Palm.

A hygiene kit as well as the entry form for France were handed out first. The kit contained a mask and some sanitizing wipes.

We passed the city of Damman in Saudi Arabia

A snack was served and came in this cute little bag that passenger can easily take with them if they don't eat the content during the flight.

The cheese sandwich and carrot cake were good, only the strawberry smoothie wasn't really to my taste.
I had tomato juice to go with it.

The cabin was darkened after they collected the rubbish.
I was tired after this short trip and didn't find any movie that caught my attention.
So I slept for about 2 hours, but being near the emergency exits and the bathroom meant the light form the bahtroom kept disturbing me each time someone used it.

I woke up as we were flying over Alexandria in Egypt, and the moving map showed we'd be flying over nice areas to observe on this cloudless night. I found some relaxing music and started looking out the window, something I love doing at night on long haul flights, and which I had missed.

No good picture came out, but it was to fly over the exact spots in Italywhere  we'd spent our vacation a month later, Lecce and Taranto in the beautiful Puglia region.

As we were flying near Rome the cabin lights were turned on and breakfast service started.
The were 2 options, one sweet one and one salty one, they were out of the latter which I wanted and I had to wait for 10 minutes to get it and it was lukewarm by that time. The FA did not even apologize for that.

I wasn't really hungry, so just ate the hot entree and the fruits and kept the yoghurt and bread for later.

Sun slowly started to rise

And we were treated to beautiful views of the Alps near Geneva

We were about 40 minutes away from Paris and started our descent through the clouds

In final

Touchdown !

We had landed on the south runway and taxied along the busy Terminal 2E where many long haul flights had already arrived from North America and Africa in spite of the early hour

We finally parked next to this 789

It took a while to get off the aircraft and by the looks of the mess in the Business Cabin, they probably sold some upgrades after all, as most seats seemed to have been used.

A last view at that beautiful aircraft

Then it was on to the shuttle to get to the mail terminal and exit, immigration was a joke with passengers being sorted according to their departing countries, but somehow the lines ended up being mixed up and it took more than one hour for me to get through, all the wile being mixed with people coming from regions with variants such as Reunion Island and South Africa.

Overall a nice flight, with tasty meals, a great IFE and a decent seat. The crew was okay, they did their job politely but nothing personnalized or overly friendly.