Flight routing
- 1SW 321 - Economy - Salt Lake City → Phoenix - Boeing 737-800
- 2DL 871 - First Class - Phoenix → Atlanta - Boeing 767-300(ER)
- 3DL 194 - Economy - Atlanta → Barcelona - Boeing 767-400(ER)
A visual of my entire journey from Salt Lake City to Barcelona via PHX & ATL which would cover a total distance of 6,678mi/10,748km. This trip report will cover the first leg of this long journey.
Introduction
Welcome everyone to a new trip report series! I will be starting my journey from my hometown airport of SLC and taking this repositioning flight down to PHX where my real journey to Europe will begin on Delta. I occasionally do repositioning flights, though not a fan but usually only do so when there's a significant price savings as this was the case. Taking me down to PHX will be on Southwest Airlines, the world's largest LCC. I've flown with SW a few times over the years and know what to expect and how fun the journey can be 😉. Let's get the journey started!
As always, I get excited when beginning a new adventure and this one was no exception. I had arrived at the airport about two hours before departure.
Check-in
Let's get checked in!
There was almost no one at the self kiosks so I helped myself to the first machine I saw and began the check in process.
Check-in was as smooth as can be and to print my boarding pass and drop off my bags only took 5-8 minutes at most. Next off to security control.
Airside
Security control as well went very smoothly and I was airside in less then 10 minutes.
Since we are traveling on a non Skyteam airline, we'll be departing out of concourse B. Which for now can only be accessed through an underground half mile long walkway. Concourse A at SLC is exclusively for departing and arrival DL flights and it's partners like AM and KL.
After a 10 minute walk I made it to concourse B.
My flight is SW321 with a scheduled departure time of 5:30p.
My aircraft
That little spec in the air is my aircraft arriving from Oakland (OAK). It's flying parallel to us on final approach.
There she comes!
And here's my 737 that'll be taking me on this short hop down to PHX tonight.
Some information about my plane:
Flight number: SW 321
Aircraft: Boeing 737-8H4
Registration: N8690A
Delivered: June 24, 2016
Age: 7.5 years (at time of flight)
This B737 is configured in an all Y class configuration fora total capacity of 175 seats. For this flight I'll end up choosing seat 26A. Seat map courtesy of aerolopa.
Boarding
Not long after, in true SW fashion, right as some people were still deplaning the agents began preparing us board for the next flight.
After checking in almost exactly 24 hours before departure, I still got assigned a fairly back boarding position of B30.
While boarding I was greeted by a friendly FA and made my way down the aisle. To my luck that last third of the plane was still empty so I looked around to find a seat with good window alignment.
Seat
I ultimately settled for seat 26A.
For having a very quick turn around, the cabin looked quite clean.
Legroom is very good, these seats offer 32" of pitch. More then most American legacy carriers.
For a low cost carrier, it's quite impressive that these seats also offer recline. The recline button is located on the armrest.
The overhead panel contains an FA call button and both individual reading lights and air vents.
Boarding is complete and tonight's flight load down to PHX is full at 100%.
Pushback
We pushed back from the gate right on time.
You can check out the full pushback, taxi and takeoff in the video below.
The cabin lights were dimmed for takeoff.
Takeoff
We'd be departing out of runway 16L.
See you in a few weeks SLC!
Views of downtown SLC.
Definitely made a great choice sitting on the left side of the plane and be treated to these wonderful mountain views on takeoff.
Tray table & Seat back contents
The tray table is of standard size and extendable.
For seat back contents we have the usual safety card…
Onboard drinks menu…
And lastly an air sickness bag.
Inflight entertainment
For IFE, Southwest offers entertainment through the onboard wifi. Which includes a great selection of movies, tv shows and and fantastic interactive map much like on AS.
Unfortunately it looks like that map wasn't updated to our current flight which read out weird routes presumably what this aircraft had flown earlier today.
We made it to cruising altitude at 36,000ft where we'd only stay here for 14 minutes before descending into PHX.
Inflight service
While we were climbing, the FA's wasted no time and took everyones drink orders and came back out with trays with all of our requested drinks and a complementary snack. This is somewhat of a very unique characteristic of SW that the FA's don't use carts out in the cabin.
I love that SW offers hot chocolate as this drink reminds me of my childhood days 😅.
The savory snack mix was very delicious and pared great with the sweet hot chocolate.
Cheers to more travels!
The cabin lights were kept with the nice light blue lighting to match the atmospheric conditions outside which felt very relaxing.
At one point we flew directly over the Grand Canyon which was very cool to see.
Gradually it began to get darker outside.
Initial descent
Not long after the pilot came through the PA to announce that we'd be beginning our initial descent into PHX.
Eventually it got completely dark outside.
Landing
You can check out the entire descent, landing and taxi down in the video below.
Tonight we'd be landing on runway 26.
Welcome to Phoenix!
Arrival at gate
We arrived at the gate 20 minutes ahead of schedule, well done Southwest!
Yes, we sure do 😅.
This concludes the trip report, stay tuned for the rest of the series to come! Thanks for reading!
Thanks for sharing! As you say, SWA have an advantage over legacy carriers with much more legroom with the 32" pitch vs legacies with typically 29-30" pitch in Y. Also nice to have that streaming IFE. Only thing missing is some in-seat charging points, but USB is slowly, but surely, rolling out across the fleet. Thanks for sharing!