Review of Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore to Kolkata in Economy

Background

This flight was part of a Sydney-Kolkata ticket, booked for AU$773/$520. Most of SQ's Kolkata flights are on the 737-8 but they do have a few A350 flights every week, making them one of just three airlines flying widebodies year-round into CCU, the others being Emirates and Qatar Airways. Air India and THAI used to fly 787s from Delhi and Bangkok respectively, hopefully they'll return sometime.
Since this was a connecting flight in Changi bags were checked through to Kolkata.

Changi Airport & Aircraft

I took these two pictures but then I realized there were way too many interesting things to photograph so I didn't try to get pictures of anything else. I did, however, take some photos at the Jewel.

This was my first time seeing the Jewel. You need to enter Singapore to visit it which is a little annoying but there was no line at immigration either way so it wasn't too hard to get out and back in again.
Security at Changi is of course at the gate. There was a long line at security but boarding was a bit late so it was fine.

Reflections… they're so annoying…

Today's aircraft is 9V-SHR, a 3.9 year old A350-900 that has always flown for SQ.

Boarding & Seat

Boarding was quite efficient, most people, impressively, respected the group system which was a pleasant surprise. The FAs were very friendly and welcoming, when they came to confirm the special meal selection they were really nice, chatting and joking and saying to let them know if anything was needed throughout the flight. This was what I had expected from the A380 crew! This is what Singapore Airlines is usually like!

The colors of the seats and the lighting look really nice.

The screen layout and design was a bit different to the one on the A380.

Overall it's pretty similar to the A380 seat with charging ports, a mirror in the tray table, lights, storage areas, etc. The seatback pocket contains the same stuff.

Before take-off the crew handed out warm towels.

There's going to be quite a bit of planespotting here, I won't list every aircraft but I'll just mention the most interesting aircraft, an Air Niugini 767 and Fiji Airways A330. Also in some of the pictures especially the 5th, you can just see the Jewel behind the terminal.

We took off on time.

Dinner

Shortly after departure, dinner was served. My preordered VJML:

I like the bottles of water they give out ex-Singapore, much nicer than the ones out of Sydney.

Something was hiding in the foil…

The meal itself was ok, not nearly as good as the first meal on the last flight. But the dessert, some kind of cake, was really good.

No ice cream on this flight unfortunately.

IFE & in-flight

Let's have a look at the IFE. Content was pretty similar to the A380 but there was a slightly better selection.

One interesting feature (shown on the third picture) was being able to have the map on the side of the screen as you watched the movie. No games on this screen either.

As with the last flight, you had to go through around 3 minutes of ads before being able to watch anything. The free wi-fi worked a little better this time, while it was slow and disconnected once, at least it worked somewhat.

Now, while the crew were very friendly on this flight and mostly made up for the last flights FAs, there was one rather big issue. Over the whole 4 hour flight, they never served me (or quite a few other people on my side of the plane) beverages. To be fair there was quite a bit of turbulence, but not the entire flight, and they really could have managed to give everyone drinks at least once. But… they didn't. A few times the cart came almost right up to my row but then they quickly retreated to the galley.

At one point I got up to request an eye-mask to go with the amenity kit from the last flight.

Pretty nice eye-mask.
I waited to see if they would serve drinks but finally as we got closer to Kolkata it became clear there would be no beverage service on this flight.

Arrival in Kolkata

Slowly getting closer and finally landing.

Welcome to India!

A pair of AIX 737-8s in the new livery, the most interesting planes I saw at CCU this time.

We have arrived.

Immigration was pretty slow and once you come down the stairs from immigration to get to the baggage claim, for some reason carry-ons needed to be screened. The good thing about all the delays was there wasn't much a wait for the bags to arrive.

Thanks for reading.