SJC AA
Sep 5, 00, 12:44 am
I booked this (and one just like it in mid-October) about a month ago when the fare was dirt cheap. It was my first propeller plane (at least since my childhood, when I think I took one from San Juan to the Virgin Islands).
9/3/00, AA 256 SJC-JFK, 1:10 pm - 9:48 pm, 757-200, 11D
I asked about an upgrade in the Admirals Club; First Class was half-empty, but I couldn't get a comp, and it wasn't worth 6 stickers for a flight that was only 20 miles longer than one that would require 5 stickers, especially since the seat next to me was blocked.
I got to my favorite 757 seat, 11D, with the seat next to it still blocked on a mostly-full flight. One of those extremely large, annoying, child-laden families asked me and the woman in 11F to switch with their row (14DEF). We did, only to discover that row 14 is missing a window. Oh well. My seatmate was probably disappointed.
The meal was the usual choice of tortellini, chicken with penne pasta, or chicken with mac & cheese. I chose the tortellini, which was OK. The tray seemed really sparse, though, with just a tiny roll and a lettuce salad to compete with the tortellini. It couldn't compare with, say, Royal Air Maroc's service on a three-hour flight from Orly to Casablanca in coach. But the seat was great, with about a 35-inch pitch, and the empty middle seat overcame the narrow 757 seats.
Near the beginning I asked one of the FAs for a deck of playing cards; he went back to look, and the next two times he saw me he mentioned that he was still looking. But the next time I saw him was on the water service near the end of the flight; he wouldn't make eye contact. He came through again, and again wouldn't make eye contact. This was bizarre; a simple "I couldn't find any" would have been fine. But I had to get his attention and ask before he told me that there were no cards on the narrowbody planes these days. (He also mentioned that he worked a widebody SJC-BOS for a month last year; I was rather surprised to hear that. Does anyone know any details of that service?) There was no snack service (maybe because it was a weekend flight?).
I got to JFK and found the admiral's club in terminal 9 closed, so I went to the one in terminal 8 and had cheese and crackers and watched the NY evening news on channel 11 (which I remember from growing up on Long Island long before there was such a thing as "the WB"!). The internet terminal in the club was broken, so I headed to the gate and waited around for a bit.
9/3/00, AA 5144 JFK-ALB, 11:05 pm - 12:06 am +1, Saab 340B, 3A
This was a rather fun, retro experience after all my big AA jets. There was no gate reader -- instead, the gate agent tore our boarding passes -- and we went down a fire-exit-looking staircase and boarded a bus, which drove literally about 40 feet to a plane we might as well have walked to. They wouldn't let us onto the plane at first, because it was too hot, so they turned on the far engine and then let us on. I showed the flight attendant my boarding pass and was informed that I had to select another seat; the FA jumpseat was broken so 3A became the emergency FA jumpseat. I sat in 3B and conversed with the FA through takeoff; she told a story of a landing in which she welcomed the passengers to LaGuardia, and the pilot broke in on the intercom to tell her they were actually in Kennedy. She was as surprised as the passengers; apparently they'd been diverted but the pilot hadn't bothered to tell anyone. The flight was very noisy (without my mediocre noise-cancelling headphones, I might have cracked) but otherwise uneventful; the seat belt sign never went off, but there was beverage service, and the seats were pretty comfortable (at least the ones with bulkhead legroom -- the legroom in the others looked cramped). I was amused by the tiny overhead bins (my thin backpack barely fit) and by the fact that the trash bags were the same "Thank you, come again" bags used by countless restaurants and delis. Impressively, the FA seemed to have the inflight announcements (which were the same as the ones on AA) memorized word-for-word; I'd assumed they read them off a card. The flying time was 39 minutes at 11,000 feet, and we arrived at a pretty nice ground-level terminal section at Albany.
I wandered around the Albany airport for a bit, admiring the architecture (very modern, with nice brickwork and stained polished wood) and the art and history exhibits there. After about a half hour I was shooed out by the security screeners, and set up shop in the comfortable armchairs in the ticketing lobby. Unable to sleep, I picked up a pile of airline timetables and browsed through them; I also carried on a 2-way pager conversation with my roommate back home.
I checked in for my return flight at 4:45 a.m., got a bite to eat and proceeded to the same gate as the previous night.
9/4/00, AA 5140 ALB-JFK, 6:00 am - 7:05 am, Saab 340B, 3C
At about 5:45 they announced that one of the emergency lights on the plane wasn't working, and maintenance was on its way to fix it. That only took about eight minutes, and we boarded quickly, went through the usual safety demo, and started taxiing. After about five minutes of taxiing, the pilot announced that the plane had failed one of the pre-flight checks, so we returned to the gate, went back into the terminal at 6:22, and waited while they did pre-flight checks on a replacement plane (this one bound for Boston at 6:45) and moved the luggage to it. We boarded that plane at 6:40, and I actually heard the in-flight checks, something I'd never heard before. The pilot said to the FA, "Aisha, we will be unpressurized. I'll try to make it a smooth climb." No one ever mentioned that fact to the passengers, though; perhaps the cruising altitude of 8000 feet was a tipoff for some. I spent the flight yawning for two reasons. We landed at JFK at 7:38 and taxiied for a while; we finally got onto buses at 7:50. Seven passengers had connections to LAX and SFO at 8:00, and they were put on a separate bus; I have no idea if they made it.
I got to the Admirals Club in T9 (open this time) and asked the agent at the desk if there was any chance of an upgrade after the lousy ALB-JFK experience. Even though I'd just made PLT, and First Class was half-empty again, I was negged (since I didn't want to use stickers). Are agents really forbidden to upgrade people without stickers, or was this just a convenient excuse? She did give me two drink coupons, though, and I had one beer but didn't feel like another at 8 a.m. I tried to relax, and checked email on the internet terminal (this one was functional). I enjoyed a bagel (how I've missed real New York bagels), and wondered about flight 1454, from Kennedy to LaGuardia, which was showing up as a 2:30 a.m. departure (but cancelled) on the video screens. Odd. (I just looked up that flight on aa.com, and it shows up as AUS-HOU-LGA. I have no idea what it was doing on the JFK departure screens.) Off to the gate.
9/4/00, AA 255 JFK-SJC, 9:00 am - 12:08 pm, 757-200, 11D
After the FC passengers boarded, there was an absoluely unintelligible announcement, in the best NY subway tradition. I went up to the gate to ask what the announcement had been; it was elite preboarding, so I said, "That's me!" and boarded. Again the seat next to me was empty, but this time the flight was only about half full. I snagged the last New York Times from the FC FA after the FC pax had declined them and shared it with my seatmate. Breakfast was either corn flakes or an omelette; I chose the omelette, which was lousy and on an incredibly sparse tray: one plastic thingie with the omelette, and one with two slices of honeydew melon. That's it. At least the melon was good.
They showed a preview for the wrong movie (Big Momma's House, which had been shown on the eastbound flight and looked terrible), so I told the first FA who passed through the aisle (named Shell). Shell thanked me profusely and offered me a free headset, which I declined because I had my own noise-cancelling headphones. But at least I didn't feel guilty about watching the movie with my own headphones this time.
Shell was extra-friendly during drink service. I watched the first half-hour or so of the right movie (Where the Money Is); it was OK, but nothing special, and I fell asleep with my headphones on. At some point I woke up, took the headphones off, and fell back to sleep, waking up every 30 minutes to reposition myself in the coach seats, which were not meant for sleeping. I slept through the snack service and woke up incredibly thirsty, but with a snack on the seat next to me. Once the cart cleared the aisle, I made my way to the galley to get a soda, and on my way back to my seat, Shell noticed the soda and said she had been on her way to my seat to see if I wanted anything to drink since I'd slept through the drink service. This struck me as so much better than the typical coach service (in which the FAs hide in the galley throughout the entire flight and never do anything more than necessary) that I filled out the SOS (employee appreciation card) I kept in my wallet and gave it to her the next time she passed through. She thanked me then, and again (this time by name) when she passed through the cabin before landing.
We arrived San Jose about twenty minutes late for no apparent reason, but it's good to return to an airport where taxiing to the gate takes about thirty seconds after flying through JFK twice.
That's about it; this is my first trip report, and I apologize if it's long and boring.
9/3/00, AA 256 SJC-JFK, 1:10 pm - 9:48 pm, 757-200, 11D
I asked about an upgrade in the Admirals Club; First Class was half-empty, but I couldn't get a comp, and it wasn't worth 6 stickers for a flight that was only 20 miles longer than one that would require 5 stickers, especially since the seat next to me was blocked.
I got to my favorite 757 seat, 11D, with the seat next to it still blocked on a mostly-full flight. One of those extremely large, annoying, child-laden families asked me and the woman in 11F to switch with their row (14DEF). We did, only to discover that row 14 is missing a window. Oh well. My seatmate was probably disappointed.
The meal was the usual choice of tortellini, chicken with penne pasta, or chicken with mac & cheese. I chose the tortellini, which was OK. The tray seemed really sparse, though, with just a tiny roll and a lettuce salad to compete with the tortellini. It couldn't compare with, say, Royal Air Maroc's service on a three-hour flight from Orly to Casablanca in coach. But the seat was great, with about a 35-inch pitch, and the empty middle seat overcame the narrow 757 seats.
Near the beginning I asked one of the FAs for a deck of playing cards; he went back to look, and the next two times he saw me he mentioned that he was still looking. But the next time I saw him was on the water service near the end of the flight; he wouldn't make eye contact. He came through again, and again wouldn't make eye contact. This was bizarre; a simple "I couldn't find any" would have been fine. But I had to get his attention and ask before he told me that there were no cards on the narrowbody planes these days. (He also mentioned that he worked a widebody SJC-BOS for a month last year; I was rather surprised to hear that. Does anyone know any details of that service?) There was no snack service (maybe because it was a weekend flight?).
I got to JFK and found the admiral's club in terminal 9 closed, so I went to the one in terminal 8 and had cheese and crackers and watched the NY evening news on channel 11 (which I remember from growing up on Long Island long before there was such a thing as "the WB"!). The internet terminal in the club was broken, so I headed to the gate and waited around for a bit.
9/3/00, AA 5144 JFK-ALB, 11:05 pm - 12:06 am +1, Saab 340B, 3A
This was a rather fun, retro experience after all my big AA jets. There was no gate reader -- instead, the gate agent tore our boarding passes -- and we went down a fire-exit-looking staircase and boarded a bus, which drove literally about 40 feet to a plane we might as well have walked to. They wouldn't let us onto the plane at first, because it was too hot, so they turned on the far engine and then let us on. I showed the flight attendant my boarding pass and was informed that I had to select another seat; the FA jumpseat was broken so 3A became the emergency FA jumpseat. I sat in 3B and conversed with the FA through takeoff; she told a story of a landing in which she welcomed the passengers to LaGuardia, and the pilot broke in on the intercom to tell her they were actually in Kennedy. She was as surprised as the passengers; apparently they'd been diverted but the pilot hadn't bothered to tell anyone. The flight was very noisy (without my mediocre noise-cancelling headphones, I might have cracked) but otherwise uneventful; the seat belt sign never went off, but there was beverage service, and the seats were pretty comfortable (at least the ones with bulkhead legroom -- the legroom in the others looked cramped). I was amused by the tiny overhead bins (my thin backpack barely fit) and by the fact that the trash bags were the same "Thank you, come again" bags used by countless restaurants and delis. Impressively, the FA seemed to have the inflight announcements (which were the same as the ones on AA) memorized word-for-word; I'd assumed they read them off a card. The flying time was 39 minutes at 11,000 feet, and we arrived at a pretty nice ground-level terminal section at Albany.
I wandered around the Albany airport for a bit, admiring the architecture (very modern, with nice brickwork and stained polished wood) and the art and history exhibits there. After about a half hour I was shooed out by the security screeners, and set up shop in the comfortable armchairs in the ticketing lobby. Unable to sleep, I picked up a pile of airline timetables and browsed through them; I also carried on a 2-way pager conversation with my roommate back home.
I checked in for my return flight at 4:45 a.m., got a bite to eat and proceeded to the same gate as the previous night.
9/4/00, AA 5140 ALB-JFK, 6:00 am - 7:05 am, Saab 340B, 3C
At about 5:45 they announced that one of the emergency lights on the plane wasn't working, and maintenance was on its way to fix it. That only took about eight minutes, and we boarded quickly, went through the usual safety demo, and started taxiing. After about five minutes of taxiing, the pilot announced that the plane had failed one of the pre-flight checks, so we returned to the gate, went back into the terminal at 6:22, and waited while they did pre-flight checks on a replacement plane (this one bound for Boston at 6:45) and moved the luggage to it. We boarded that plane at 6:40, and I actually heard the in-flight checks, something I'd never heard before. The pilot said to the FA, "Aisha, we will be unpressurized. I'll try to make it a smooth climb." No one ever mentioned that fact to the passengers, though; perhaps the cruising altitude of 8000 feet was a tipoff for some. I spent the flight yawning for two reasons. We landed at JFK at 7:38 and taxiied for a while; we finally got onto buses at 7:50. Seven passengers had connections to LAX and SFO at 8:00, and they were put on a separate bus; I have no idea if they made it.
I got to the Admirals Club in T9 (open this time) and asked the agent at the desk if there was any chance of an upgrade after the lousy ALB-JFK experience. Even though I'd just made PLT, and First Class was half-empty again, I was negged (since I didn't want to use stickers). Are agents really forbidden to upgrade people without stickers, or was this just a convenient excuse? She did give me two drink coupons, though, and I had one beer but didn't feel like another at 8 a.m. I tried to relax, and checked email on the internet terminal (this one was functional). I enjoyed a bagel (how I've missed real New York bagels), and wondered about flight 1454, from Kennedy to LaGuardia, which was showing up as a 2:30 a.m. departure (but cancelled) on the video screens. Odd. (I just looked up that flight on aa.com, and it shows up as AUS-HOU-LGA. I have no idea what it was doing on the JFK departure screens.) Off to the gate.
9/4/00, AA 255 JFK-SJC, 9:00 am - 12:08 pm, 757-200, 11D
After the FC passengers boarded, there was an absoluely unintelligible announcement, in the best NY subway tradition. I went up to the gate to ask what the announcement had been; it was elite preboarding, so I said, "That's me!" and boarded. Again the seat next to me was empty, but this time the flight was only about half full. I snagged the last New York Times from the FC FA after the FC pax had declined them and shared it with my seatmate. Breakfast was either corn flakes or an omelette; I chose the omelette, which was lousy and on an incredibly sparse tray: one plastic thingie with the omelette, and one with two slices of honeydew melon. That's it. At least the melon was good.
They showed a preview for the wrong movie (Big Momma's House, which had been shown on the eastbound flight and looked terrible), so I told the first FA who passed through the aisle (named Shell). Shell thanked me profusely and offered me a free headset, which I declined because I had my own noise-cancelling headphones. But at least I didn't feel guilty about watching the movie with my own headphones this time.
Shell was extra-friendly during drink service. I watched the first half-hour or so of the right movie (Where the Money Is); it was OK, but nothing special, and I fell asleep with my headphones on. At some point I woke up, took the headphones off, and fell back to sleep, waking up every 30 minutes to reposition myself in the coach seats, which were not meant for sleeping. I slept through the snack service and woke up incredibly thirsty, but with a snack on the seat next to me. Once the cart cleared the aisle, I made my way to the galley to get a soda, and on my way back to my seat, Shell noticed the soda and said she had been on her way to my seat to see if I wanted anything to drink since I'd slept through the drink service. This struck me as so much better than the typical coach service (in which the FAs hide in the galley throughout the entire flight and never do anything more than necessary) that I filled out the SOS (employee appreciation card) I kept in my wallet and gave it to her the next time she passed through. She thanked me then, and again (this time by name) when she passed through the cabin before landing.
We arrived San Jose about twenty minutes late for no apparent reason, but it's good to return to an airport where taxiing to the gate takes about thirty seconds after flying through JFK twice.
That's about it; this is my first trip report, and I apologize if it's long and boring.