boarding
My connecting flight arrived in at gate E16, and this flight was departing from right next door at gate E12. So, it was a short and easy walk to my gate. But CLT is a big airport that’s laid out in a weird pier format, and the only thing I can say about it is to give yourself plenty of time if you’re connecting, especially if you’re connecting to or from a regional aircraft (American Eagle) to or from a mainline aircraft.
Our inbound aircraft arrived in a few minutes late from Mobile. Our original boarding time was 3:53, which is when the aircraft arrived. But, they kept our departure time the same.
By 4:08, not a single passenger coming in from Mobile had deplaned. So I was pretty confident at this point that we would not be departing at 4:23. There was no announcement from the gate agents or any updates to the flight status. In my experience, American is not as good about communicating about delays. United is usually very proactive about delays. When you’re 20 minutes behind schedule on boarding, you should give an update to the passengers. Especially when boarding is supposed to end at 4:08, and the inbound passengers haven’t disembarked yet.
We finally began boarding at 4:17. I boarded with group 2 which was called simultaneously with group 1 and concierge key members.
cabin and seat
These E-145s that are operated by Piedmont are in a word- old. This 22 year-old ERJ-145 is really showing its age with this cabin. They really need to refresh this cabin a bit.
The cabin is arranged in a 1-2 configuration with the “A” seats being on the left side of the cabin, offering both a window and aisle.
I quickly found my seat 15A, a single aisle seat towards the middle of the aircraft.
The legroom is tight. And the seats are small at 17 inches wide and 31 inches of pitch. So, there’s not a whole lot of room under the seat in front of you for your personal belongings. Backpacks and other personal items can be placed in the tiny overhead bins over seats B and C. It should be noted that all of the seats on the ERJ-145 are nearly identical in terms of comfort. Maybe the exit rows have more legroom, but I wouldn’t work too hard to find your perfect seat on this aircraft.
The seat features one window and the reason why I selected it, is because it has an excellent view of the trailing edge of the wing.
flight
At 4:23, the captain came in to announce our flight time of 30 minutes and a cruising altitude of 28,000 feet.
The safety demonstration began at 4:27.
At 4:37, we got a message from the captain who said that we were waiting for our turn for pushback but that we were next. There were a lot of flights departing from our alleyway at the same time as we were.
We finally pushed back at 4:42.
Our pushback was pretty long. It took 4 minutes. And no- it wasn’t stop and go. It was a literal 4 minute long straight push back. I kind of wondered if they were pushing us all the at to the runway! :D
At 4:46, the pushback stopped and we started up our engines.
At 4:48, we were taxiing. The threshold of Runway 18L was right next to our gate, so by 4:49, we were holding short of the runway.
We had to await a few arrivals, so we had a bit of a wait before taking off.
At 4:54, we were taking off on runway 18L.
At 5:00, we reached our cruising altitude of 28,000 feet.
It should be noted that there is no WiFi or other in flight entertainment on this aircraft. There wasn’t even a magazine in the seat back pocket, because American stopped using their in-flight magazine, American Way, back in June 2021. So, I was glad that I downloaded a playlist on Spotify to listen to for this flight.
There was no in flight service offered on today’s flight given the short duration. I had brought my own water bottle on board with me, so I was good.
arrival
At 5:13, we were already beginning our descent into Greenville, NC.
At 5:30, we touched down in Greenville on Runway 20.
At 5:32, we arrived at the gate, which was about 5 minutes ahead of our scheduled arrival time of 5:37.
