My flight for this evening will take me to Jeddah to perform the holy journey of Omra. Since I hold a Platinum Mastercard from Banque AUDI, I was allowed to access MEA’s VIP lounge located in the upper floor of the terminal.
I reached Raffic Hariri Airport about 3 hours prior to my flight, checked in my luggage quickly and headed to the Cedar Lounge.
The Cedar Lounge is very wide and allows its visitors to snap shots of the tarmac traffic. My plane for this evening will be MEA’s A320-214 registered F-OMRB on lease from GECAS. The aircraft was registered after two months to become T7-MRB.
JtTcC7Ek8/02.JPG
Here are pictures of the lounge, tarmac activities and my plane.
Boarding started at 17:10, however due to some VISA issues with some Syrian passengers, we took off from Beirut at 18:05 i.e. 20 minutes behind our scheduled time.
After take-off and reaching our cruising attitude of 31,000 feet, meal service started. We had a choice between chicken friekeh (Lebanese dish with rice) or Shrimp with noodles. I opted for the chicken was excellent.
We had some tail winds, accordingly we arrived at Jeddah 10 minutes earlier than our scheduled time (despite 20 mins delay at Beirut). Due to the chaos at Jeddah we were stuck in the airport for 6 hours before we were able to head to our hotels.
Thank you Mr Itani for your post 3amb betdarib 3leyna:p
Nice! Thank you for this FR! Interesting to see how Jeddah's airport is handling the huge amount of passengers. Food looks great (Y)
Six hours to get out of the airport ?! How can they be so inefficient in JED, and how do they manage during the hajj ?
The catering seems decent for a flight of this duration. The conclusion is terse, but adequate.
Thanks for this report, and welcome among the contributors to the website !
Thank you for this first FR and welcome aboard :)