B-HXB

Those of you who have read my previous trip reports or who have read my posts on the CX forum will probably know that I was not impressed when Cathay Pacific announced their plans to change ten of their fifteen Airbus 340-300s from a three-class configuration to a two-class Business-Economy configuration for use on long thin routes. Not being any particular powerhouse that generates a great deal of premium travel Auckland was a prime candidate for the two-class aircraft. On my way to London, this would be my first trip on the new two-class A340 and I was a little interested to see just how well J would stack up against F…

Flight: CX108
Aircraft: Airbus 340-300, B-HXJ
Departure time: 1250
Departure gate: 1
Sector: AKL HKG

Cathay Pacific has designated their two-class A340-300s with the code 34D. I have no idea what the D stands for officially – unofficially, I have a whole list of words, none of which are complimentary. The rumoured configuration of the 34D is 30 J seats and 257 Y seats, although since CX seem to display a particular aversion to keeping their online seat maps up to date I cannot confirm whether the seat capacity for Y is in fact correct.

Three check-in counters were open at the Qantas Premium check-in area when I arrived but one was just closing. No queues. Check-in was painless except for the fact that they could only accept cash for departure tax sticker payment (which I have ranted about in the past and will not repeat again here, only to once again note that I curse the management of Auckland Airport with all my heart). That plus the fact that the pre-clearance Customs lane was closed meant that I left the check-in area slightly more wound up than when I arrived.

After getting a bite to eat upstairs I was suitably prepared to run the gauntlet of Auckland Airport’s departure infrastructure. First stop: BNZ. Observation: queues. Long horrible queues snaking out into the main departures foyer. At the very least can’t they separate those wanting to pay the damn tax and those who want to exchange foreign currency or check their savings account balance or think about what they want to get Aunt Jane for her birthday or whatever the hell it is that people seem to do at the counter which means they hold up the teller for ten minutes? It is absolutely ridiculous to wait for upwards of twenty minutes for the transaction to be over in two seconds. Come to think of it, it’s almost like visiting my dentist, except without the outdated magazines during the wait to keep you distracted.

I was then snagged by the airport redcoats posted at departures on my way to passport control and directed to weigh my handcarry. I normally get a CX tag at check-in to avoid this but this had slipped my mind so I just flashed my boarding pass at them. The words ‘Business Class’ got me through, even though my handcarry is usually within limits anyway. I simply have better things to do with my time than play weighing games.

Like queuing for passport control. A nice long snaky line similar to the BNZ one but even longer, and more bendy. A Customs Officer was at the Express Lane separation to check that people had paid their tax and completed their departure card. They didn’t do a very good job – I noticed lots of people being caught out at later points in the queue that had either not paid their tax or not completed the card. The former were forced to go back outside and pay it which I’m sure improves New Zealand’s image as a tourist-friendly country to no end.

Naturally, just as I neared the front of the queue they opened more counters, presumably as the officers came back from their lunch break. I was not impressed with the thirty-minute wait at passport control nor with the lack of Fast Track facilities for premium passengers (Express Lane access is dependent on the downstairs QF desk being open) or New Zealand passport holders.

Security screening was tolerable – all four stations were in play and the flow of people coming through from passport control was at a trickle thanks to the limited counters open there and the speed of processing. I was rather annoyed that laptops were required to be taken out and screened separately, especially since I was given to understand this rule had been relaxed recently and I see no good reason for reinstating it given that no other airport security requires this except for Sydney. And Sydney Airport is, like Auckland, nowhere near the top of my airport rankings list unless one reads said list from the bottom up.

Basically by the time I had cleared all the formalities it was time to get on board, so I gave the QF lounge the skip – which I assure you caused me no pangs of distress – and strolled down to gate 1. There were still a few people milling around in the gate lounge and waiting to board, with one long queue on the left and one shorter queue on the right. Joining the shorter queue which presumably was the Business Class processing station despite it not being signposted as it is usually ex-AKL, I was boarded within a matter of seconds and was on my way towards my first look at the 34D.

B-HXB

The Inflight Service Manager and a Senior Purser were on hand at 1L to direct traffic and I arrived at my seat to find a Purser had commandeered it in my absence to assist traffic flow. After a little bit of handcarry manoeuvring I managed to get into the seat space and she managed to get into the aisle, luckily without backing traffic up too much. Once I had stowed my bag in the overhead locker I could take a good look around at what the cabin looked like.

The previous three-class cabin 34C had two rows of First Class and two rows of Business Class between doors 1 and 2, with the remaining three rows of J behind door 2. With First Class gone, the entire J cabin had moved up to between doors 1 and 2 and Economy starting from door 2 back. In other words, for those who are familiar with the CX regional A330 layout, it looked exactly like that except with the long-haul New Business Class seats fitted in five rows of 2-2-2. Naturally in contrast with the spaciousness of the F cabin it couldn’t compare, but I imagine that a certain element of privacy created in the 34C J cabins by the door 2 separation is lost in the 34D, which has just one big lump of J. 11AC are situated quite forward and if anything the centre 11DG are closer to row 12 than row 11. The toilets previously used by F – the one forward of 11HK (formerly forward of 1K) and the one right behind the cockpit are now for J class, as evident by the existence of the horrible blue-green mosaic tile scheme with eggshell blue walls which in my opinion makes it look exactly like a badly decorated public toilet.

The toilet behind the cockpit on the A340-300 has always been a contentious issue. Back in the days when all the A343s were three-class, some crews could get a bit sticky about passengers using that one, saying it was a crew toilet but with 8 passengers no difficulties really arose from that policy. However, when I made to use it on this occasion while HXJ was still on the ground, the crew tried to stop me. When I tackled them on the point that a 30:1 passenger to toilet ratio was unacceptable they clarified that the forward toilet was out of bounds only when the cockpit door was open and passengers were welcome to use it inflight, which I accepted at the time but thought personally was a bit over the top seeing as I have never had any problems with using that bathroom on the ground in the past.

On the return however one overzealous Purser intercepted me next to the galley and tried to direct me to the toilets at the back (which incidentally are Y toilets) although he let me forward once I pointed out – perhaps rather frostily since I had already been through this on the outbound and have no intention of repeating it for every 34D flight I take – that there were two toilets for thirty passengers, one of which was the forward one which I fully intended to use. The ISM later came round to apologise, explaining that the purser was unfamiliar with the new configuration. From talking with the ISM it seems that the cabin crew are caught in the middle of the crossfire for control of the forward toilet – the cockpit crew, whose rest bunks are directly opposite it had complained of the noise. Apparently on the 34C it was not much of a problem since 8 passengers meant that that toilet was used infrequently, but with 30 passengers on the 34D it was. This appears to be a practical reconfiguration problem completely overlooked by CX and certainly needs to be addressed.

B-HXB

The weather that particular day in Auckland was rather miserable but it was apparently even more so in other parts of New Zealand. Wellington in particular had apparently been affected by fog that morning, with the result that some flights were delayed, making the connection time for transferring passengers extremely tight. This was not helped by the queues at immigration at Auckland which backed the poor people up even further. The captain came on to explain the delay at about scheduled push-back time, by which time the J cabin was about half full. The transit pax began trickling on board about 15 minutes after that announcement and we seemed to be ready to go, with the captain advising that we were just waiting for their bags to be transferred over.

I knew we could expect a long wait the minute I overheard the ISM instruct her crew to run a second drinks service (orange juice, water, champagne). Unfortunately I had a left-hand window and parked at gate 1, this gave the worst possible view of any parking position at AKL. People on the right had some aircraft movements to keep themselves occupied with, but I had a view of a wall.

As it transpired, a “minor item” was missing from HXJ’s first aid kit – which turned out to be a tube of burn cream that had been used up on the inbound – and the captain was refusing to fly without it. All in all, that put us around an hour behind schedule, with pushback from gate 1 at around 1350. The captain apologised for the delay, also adding a special apology to those transit passengers who had dashed helter-skelter from the domestic terminal only to sit on HXJ for thirty minutes while the first aid kit was made complete again. The crew had any rate made good use of the delay, doing the rounds with menus, newspapers and amenity kits; the latter not being very impressive, consisting of one tube of lip balm, one tube of something cosmetic which I tucked away somewhere and lost, an eyeshade, sockettes, a bottle of mouthwash, earplugs and a toothbrush.

The J menu was for May, June and July and mine had an artistic rendition of some huge asparagus stalks on the front:

LATE LUNCH

Hot Savouries

Salad
Seasonal Salad
served with Balsamic Vinegar Dressing

Appetizer
Marinated Prawn with Seafood Roulade and Mango Salsa

Main Courses
Beef Fillet Steak with Red Wine Wild Mushroom Sauce
Sauteed Potato Wedges with Parsley, Asparagus and Baby Carrots

Stir Fried Seafood with Sweet Bean Sauce
Steamed Rice and Stir-fried Pak Choy

Chicken Teriyaki Style
Steamed Rice, Stir-fried Pak Choy, Carrot and Mushrooms

Penne Pasta with Tomato Sauce and Chorizo Sausage

Cheese Board

Fresh Seasonal Fruits

Dessert
Chocolate Tart
or
Tiramisu with Strawberry

Assorted Bread and Rolls

Tea and Coffee

Pralines


Once HXJ had passed through ten thousand feet and the cockpit had cycled the seatbelt sign twice the crew began preparations for the lunch service and the ISM came round the Business Class cabin, welcoming each passenger on board individually and apologising for not being able to do her rounds during the ground delay. Arrival documentation and health declarations for Hong Kong were handed out. A couple of people had connecting flights they would likely miss due to the late departure and the ISM promised them that she’d contact HK ground staff for any necessary rebookings. Meanwhile the awful exercise video ran its course and once that particular torture device was over, Studio CX initialised.

The rest of the crew came round to take post-takeoff drink orders, which were then delivered by trolley along with the hot savouries, which consisted of one small stick of chicken satay, one small stick of beef satay and a dollop of peanut sauce. Unlike the main courses which followed later on in the service the hot savouries were plated in front of you on to a small plate and the sauce added on the side. The senior purser did the left-hand aisle, the flight attendant the right, with the purser relegated to food preparation in the galley. Serving was from the back of the cabin moving forwards.

Even with only 18 passengers out of a possible 30 the lunch service seemed a bit stilted with irregular gaps between the courses. After the empty savoury plates and napkins had been collected the cabin crew came round with the blue cotton tablecloths, and the purser pitched in with tray delivery which came straight out from the galley and not by trolley.

The little CX ad card was clipped to the outside of the napkin with a small crimson peg and was for the airline’s new non-stop service to New York, complete with a little pull-tag of a CX A340-600 which one could yank in and out to ‘extend’ the ad card. That amused me for a while.

The appetiser and salad bowl were already on the tray with the salad dressing in a separate plastic tub, and the cutlery wrapped in the napkin. Surprisingly plastic knives were still being used even though metal knives are making appearances on other CX sectors. Once the trays had been delivered the purser came round with the bread basket.

Following the clearing of the appetiser plates, the main course trolley was rolled out, again serving from the back forwards. The mains were all preplated in casserole dishes but were still hot when they reached me in row 12, mainly due to the purser replenishing the mains at constant intervals from the galley. They had run out of the chicken teriyaki by the time they got up to where I was and the stir-fried seafood did not look at all appetising so I went for the steak, which was fine. As is the case with most airline food it needed a bit of salt and peppering. The crew were quite good in keeping drinks topped up and a glass of water was also poured with selection of the main course.

Next on the cards was the cheese and fruit service, again done by trolley from the back forwards but this time with two crew members. I don’t go for cheese so I didn’t really notice what they had on offer, but for the fruits there were grapes, melon, pineapple and orange. Following that was the dessert and hot beverage service. Not on the menu but on offer were tiny tubs of Kapiti ice cream (vanilla, raspberry or chocolate chip). Not having tried one before but heard others raving about it, I decided to be adventurous and try the tiramisu. I thought it tasted fine (not knowing what a tiramisu was meant to taste like) but overheard another passenger complaining to his companion that it was soggy at the bottom where the strawberry sauce had soaked into the cake base.

Rounding off the meal service was the offering of a box of chocolates, a hot towel service and water bottle distribution.

B-HXB

When Cathay Pacific first introduced their New Business Class seat in 2001, it was advertised as a ‘lie-flat seat’ which offered the ‘ergonomically proven Z-position for sleeping’. Back then their long-haul flights were all operated by three-class aircraft and so I really didn’t pay too much attention to what the NBC seat was or was not. I did get a chance to try it out on a short-haul to Kuala Lumpur and was fairly impressed with it for a brief day flight and found it an improvement over the former long-haul cradle business class seat.

Thus being unfamiliar with it, I logically had to play around with the seat for a bit once the meal service had finished and the cabin lights dimmed, for research purposes . There were two buttons which seemed to do exactly the same job – the seat recline arrow and another white button with a picture of the seat in the Z-shape both reclined the seat into the cocoon and simultaneously adjusted the legrest as the seat slid forward (incidentally on the seats fitted on some other 34Ds it appears that they have done away with the white button and just have the seat recline arrow).

If you keep pressing the recline button, the seat stops once it reaches the preset Z-position and you have to lift your finger and press the button again before the seat goes flat. Bringing your seat back upright, it does the same thing, moving from lie-flat to Z to upright. The supposed angle of recline when the seat is flat is nine degrees.

I did not feel that the seat was in fact a lie-flat one. Even in the most extended position the seat cushion was scalloped upwards, which meant that it simply felt like a really elongated Z. For a while I left it in the maximum reclined position but after ten minutes or so it became rather annoying since my feet were hitting the support shell of the seat in front and curling up for a prolonged period was equally uncomfortable. I tried returning to the Z-position, which was slightly better and managed to doze off for an hour or so.

All in all, the seat was a good one to sit in – for meals or at a bit of an angle whilst watching the PTV. It was not a good seat, in my opinion, for sleeping, for both the reasons mentioned above and from what I felt was a distinct lack of support for the lower part of the body in both the Z and lie-flat positions.

B-HXB

Most of the passengers were either dozing or checking out the entertainment options on their PTV in between the conclusion of the lunch service and the commencement of the refreshment service two hours before landing. The Cathay New Business Class seat has 10.4 inch personal televisions mounted on the back of the seat shell in front, featuring an Audio Video on Demand system. During the meal service I had started running through all eight episodes of ‘City to the Sky’, a RTHK series on Hong Kong International Airport. Unfortunately most of the soundtrack was in Cantonese (it being classed as HKTV) and my knowledge of that language, especially in a formal sense, is rusty at best but it was worth watching for the behind-the-scenes look at HKIA which is, unlike Auckland, one of my favourite airports. And it was particularly interesting during one bit explaining gate assignments, to observe the CX716 being tracked change from a landing 777-300 to a taxiing A330-300 back to a 777-300 turning into the gate back to attaching the bridges to the A330-300.

The selection of movies seemed drastically reduced from when Studio CX was first launched, although TV on Demand was fairly well stocked. A separate entertainment guide for First and Business Class was tucked away in the seat pocket and noise cancelling headphones stowed and strapped underneath the centre armrest. The headphones had little ‘sterilised’ stickers attached to the earphone pads which I had great fun sticking on strategic points in the wine list. Sterilised white wines, anybody?

The system worked like a dream with no technical problems and easy navigation. My only complaint would be not being able to run Audio on Demand and Airshow simultaneously and linking with that the fact that the default soundtrack for Airshow and menu navigation seems to be the classical channel, which for some reason is louder than when playing movies or audio tracks so that it is necessary to jam the volume button down when returning to the menu afterwards to avoid being deafened.

During what I like to term the lethargic part of the flight where crew activity is kept to a minimum, the flight attendant and pursers on duty peeped out of the curtain separating the cabin and the galley occasionally to check if anyone needed anything and also came around with a tray of chocolates and biscuits.

There was a Light Options part of the menu which was available any time after the lunch service:

LIGHT OPTIONS

Noodles in Soup with Scallop, Prawn
Choy Sum and Mushrooms
served with Chilli Sauce

Selected Sandwiches (Smoked Salmon, Roast Beef, Char-grilled Vegetables with Herb Cream Cheese)


About five minutes or so after I asked the purser to prepare the noodles, around 7 pm New Zealand time (she warned me that it’d take about ten to fifteen minutes) the seat belt sign dinged on. Cathay seem to have implemented a strict policy that hot beverage service must be suspended whenever the seat belt sign is on, presumably to avoid any nasty accidents involving turbulence and boiling liquid. Unfortunately, Cathay is also fairly notorious in keeping their seat belt signs on for a long period of time. Consequently the purser came round to tell me that she’d serve my bowl of noodles as soon as the seat belt sign went off but I was resigning myself to a good half-hour’s wait at the very least.

I decided that Studio CX offered the best distraction to the gnawing pains of hunger and started up a movie. It didn’t really work, thanks to the fact that the passenger diagonally forward opposite me across the aisle had had his bowl served before the service was suspended and I was straight in the line of fire of the glorious aroma that was coming from his noodles. Since after half an hour it didn’t look like the seat belt sign was showing any sign of blinking off with the occasional shudder as HXJ bumped through the sky, the next time the purser came round to reassure me she’d not forgotten about my noodles (she was quite good about doing it every fifteen minutes) I asked if I could have some of the sandwiches in the meantime. She looked a bit taken aback and told me they were cold (amazingly good character judgment on her part as I normally am not a cold-food type person) but by this time I was pretty much ready to bolt down anything, as long as it was something edible.

Served up a rectangular white china dish, they weren’t really sandwiches in the traditional bread-filling-bread type of sandwich. The smoked salmon and roast beef came closest with an open-faced style but the vegetables were wrapped in this very artistic looking flat-bread pita-type roll. I am not a vegetables person so I left that well alone.

While certainly not filling, the sandwiches helped in temporarily stalling the hunger pangs until the seat belt sign finally snapped off, about an hour after it had first switched on (although my perception of the length of time could very well have been affected by my need for food) and the purser was pretty quick in dishing out my noodles. She had already laid the tablecloth earlier and delivered a drink along with my sandwiches, so it was dive straight into the heavenly scent steaming up from the bowl. The noodles seemed like the type served in First Class – egg noodles in Lee Kum Kee soup stock and not instant cup noodles poured into a bowl which I remember from my last trip in Business Class on this route in 1999. Which goes to show that things do change and sometimes for the better! A pair of wooden chopsticks and a ceramic spoon, and a small blue dish holding a packet of Guilin chilli sauce came with the food.

Adequately sated, I put the seat in a slightly reclined position and settled in to finish 50 First Dates which I had started earlier. By the time I’d finished the movie, the crew had switched the cabin lights back on and were beginning to prepare for the Refreshments service…

REFRESHMENTS

Appetizer
Seasonal Fruit Plate

Main Courses
Chicken with Dried Fungus and Lily Flower
Steamed Rice and Stir-fried Vegetables

Pork Piccata with Tomato Capsicum Sauce
Buttered Linguini


Light Options
Noodles in Soup with Scallop, Prawn
Choy Sum and Mushrooms
served with Chilli Sauce

Selected Sandwiches (Smoked Salmon, Roast Beef, Char-grilled Vegetables with Herb Cream Cheese)


Dessert
Ice Cream
Selected Pastries

Tea and Coffee

Pralines


Again, the whole tablecloth – drinks orders – tray delivery cycle was re-enacted (this time without the ad card or the bread plate) and the mains trolley rolled out again by the senior purser. The light options that the crew still had available were put out on the trolley as well and I had another bowl of noodles after they ran out of the pork piccata. The second bowl was almost as good as the first; the reason not being any decline in quality the second time round but merely a case of diminishing returns.

As with the lunch service the dessert and hot beverage cart was double-teamed, with the flight attendant and senior purser running the left-hand aisle first and then the right. The same small tubs of Kapiti ice cream left over from lunch were available again, but not inspired by the flavours I went for a delectable looking chocolate brownie which was probably high in everything that’s not good for me and low in everything that is. Both this dessert and the tiramisu earlier came with a small metal spork, which was a perfect design – functional and elegant.

B-HXB

I filled out the rest of the cruise with short TV on Demand sitcoms and switched over to Airshow with about thirty minutes left. Already on screen was gate information for passengers with connecting flights and our arrival gate number. Shortly afterwards the captain came on to inform us of our descent into Hong Kong and that the weather waiting to welcome us was a sultry thirty-three degrees Celsius, a stark contrast to thirteen degree Auckland. A final hot towel service was run prior to landing.

Presumably due to tail winds we had made up some time during the flight and after a few turns to line us up on runway 07L we touched down in Hong Kong only about thirty-five minutes behind schedule. From our roll-off point a fairly short taxi to HXJ’s assigned parking gate 28 was only made longer by a China Airlines 747-400 deciding that the perfect moment for pushback from the adjacent gate 26 was when we were due in next door.

With the senior purser being relegated to door 2 for landing only the ISM, flight attendant and purser were on hand at door 1. After the ISM had cross-checked all doors disarmed with her crew her diplomatic talents were strained by some of the other J class passengers making small talk like “Wow that was a long flight” and “This flight took as long as going to Toronto”. My diplomacy not being up to the standards of the CX crew I was unable to refrain from behind them, given that the flight today had only taken twelve hours – eleven flying plus one on the ground.

Gate 28 is situated midway along the central concourse and is just borderline for not needing to take the Automated People Mover to passport control. Instead the walk involves transversing four travellators, the length of the distance between adjacent gates. Passport control took a few brief seconds and after a few minutes’ wait for the bags to be delivered to reclaim 12, I was through HKIA in the usual under 20 minutes, this time clocking up a plane-to-exit time of 15.


Is it worth it to fly F instead of J?
This seems to be the big question surrounding premium travel now that more and more lie-flat seats are coming on stream in Business Class. Indeed, there seems to be a worldwide trend towards moving away from First Class, as evident by many airlines increasingly opting for a two-class layout on certain long haul routes (which is very sad to see). Based on this particular trip, I found Business Class – on Cathay Pacific, at least – offers nowhere near the level of comfort, privacy or service of First Class and accordingly my answer to the above question would have to be Yes.

RTW4

One of the reasons I now avoid the AKL-HKG run when I am planning a RTW is the inability to fly in F on CX. I feel that your report "hit the nail on the head". C class on CX is good for short hauls but the greater than 5000 mile trek from NZ to HK really needs to have a first class option. There now seems to be an even greater difference in service between J and F on CX service from HK to Australia incidentally.

Kiwi Flyer

Wow a very detailed report B-HXB ^

Glad to hear you survived the experience of not flying first (albeit not as happy). Does this mean you will now hop across the ditch to get CX F from SYD?

Incidently you can avoid the queues at AKL for both departure tax and immigration by being premium passenger (or *G or NZ Koru) on *A - care of the premium check-in facility

mad_atta

Thanks for sharing your downgraded travel experience with us, B-HXB - at least your trip reporting skills were up to their usual first-class levels.

For those moments in AKL when you can't pay your departure tax at the premium desks, I've found a useful little workaround for avoiding the queues. Over at the arrivals end of the concourse there is another currency exchange window, which does not advertise the fact that you can also pay your departure tax there (probably to try to keep it relatively free for arriving pax) but the staff there have been very happy to process my tax payment. This can save a good twenty minutes at a busy time.

MrSydney

B-HXB

As always, another outstanding Trip Report!!! Though it did not sound a particulary fabulous experience IMHO.

You poor thing - you never have much luck at AKL whereas I never seem to have a problem. Just luck I guess.

Anyway, it was great to hear from you again.

Fliar

Thanks for the report.

Kiwiflyer, what do you mean by the above? If as *G you fly say SIA then you'll have to check in there and get your departure tax in the departure hall too, right? I assume you can't use the Air NZ customs line?

number_6

I was able to pay departure tax by credit card at the QF F checkin (this was in May 2004); wonder why this is no longer allowed? Or is it only CX that prohibits it (I was flying QF).
As for the CX skybed, I agree with your comments. I flew it on a 1 hour flight (HKG-TPE) and it doesn't go flat, much less level. Excellent as a seat, but unacceptable as a bed. The QF Skybed is a much better design. CX has made a big mistake with this one (but so did SQ, and CX seems to have matched SQ in the J seating).

Buster CT1K

A fine report! Too bad about the loss of F, but hurray for the improved noodles. Yum. Getting hungry....