Mofomat

The Background

This flight is part of a longer trip from Bangkok to New York (via Singapore, Paris, Milan, Buenos Aires and Atlanta). The trip report for the Bangkok to Paris (via Singapore) legs on Singapore Airlines can be found here.

This trip report may be of particular interest to those who got in on the AZ CMB-NYC good deal fare.

To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to the flight on Alitalia, especially after two days earlier sampling the superb new Singapore Airlines business class. I had flown Alitalia business in Europe before, and was relatively pleased, but I had more trepidation for the long haul flight, especially on this very long sector of 6,947 miles from Milan to Buenos Aires, where a lack of service would be more noticeable.

The Itinerary

Milan (MXP) – Buenos Aires (EZE)
Alitalia
Magnifica (Business class)

Mofomat

Date Sunday 23rd March 2008
Airline Alitalia
Class of service Magnifica (Business class)
Flight number AZ682
Aircraft type Boeing 777-200ER
Scheduled (actual) departure time 2145 (2219)
Scheduled (actual) arrival time 0735* (0812)
Flight duration 13:31
Distance 6,947 miles
Average speed 514 mph

Departure
I arrived at Milan Malpensa at about 1955, on an Air France operated A320 from Paris (CDG). I made my way to the “Botticelli” lounge. The lounge that Alitalia use for their non-Schengen departures from Malpensa. I had used this lounge about two years previously and remembered it to be fairly average. On arrival this time I realised things had gone downhill from then. It was relatively small, and absolutely full. There was a serviced bar area where you could request drinks. On this bar was a bowl of peanuts and a bowl of olives. Next to these was an empty plate which rumour has it once contained a type of pastry thing. I positioned myself in the business centre, or should I say broom cupboard. I used the internet on my laptop (24 hours for 10 Euro’s was the cheapest plan) for about one hour, before I made my way to board the aircraft.

On arrival at the gate there was no sign of priority boarding for premium passengers. Oh, I tell a lie. There WAS a sign for premium passengers, but it was turned towards the wall and not in use. Nevermind. I was one of the last to board anyway, so I only had to queue for 15 minutes. Once on board the aircraft I was offered an orange juice. So far so good. We pushed back 34 minutes late.

Routing
On departure I experienced a strange situation. All departures and arrivals were using the runways in a northern direction, as in arriving from the south and departing to the north. Our flight however, taxied to the northern end of the right hand runway for departure. Completely in the opposite direction to the traffic flow. This, I can only imagine, was because a northerly departure would result in weight penalties due to the proximity of the Alps, or maybe it was because of noise abatement. It confused me anyway, and I have a bit of knowledge of how airports operate. I don’t know what they would do if the wind was sufficient to require a northerly departure. From there it was a right hand turn, south of Turin, into southern France, across the Mediterranean, south of Barcelona, along the eastern coast of Spain, across the Strait of Gibraltar, into Morocco, along the western coast of Africa passing by Dakar. From there it was out across the South Atlantic, just to the east of Rio de Janeiro, passing over the southern part of Brazil, before starting descent over Uruguay.




Seat and cabin
The good news about Alitalia business class is the fact that it is 2-2-2, as opposed to many “quality” carriers such as Air France, KLM and Emirates, which are 2-3-2. The seat isn’t horizontal, or even lie-flat, but instead is a cradle seat. It can be adjusted in various ways, although it was very hard to decipher the controls and what they did. My seat was also in very bad condition. Another thing which I didn’t like was the leather upholstery. It didn’t allow my body to “breathe” and it also made it very easy to slide down the seat.



Entertainment
The seat has a personal TV screen, of average size. There was a choice of about 16 channels including the usual selection of films, and three channels of light programmes, of which none looked like anything anybody would want to watch. More surprising was the pathetic headphones that were handed out to the business passengers. They were the same feable ones that you expect in economy! The ones where you can hardly hear what you are watching, and the type that constantly fall off your ear. More annoying for me was that I hadn’t brought my BOSE noise cancellation headphones in order to save space. I suppose I could sleep through the flight at least.

Pathetic headphones


Food and drink
Food and drink service started soon after we departed Milan. Just after take-off we were given a bowl of nuts. Not long after that the appetizers were served. The stewards came with a trolley and you could select either pasta or semolina medallions. I chose the latter. Although cold, they were quite nice.

Then for main course, the same thing happened again. The stewards came with a trolley and you could choose between one of three main courses. I cannot remember the other two, but I had the mixed grill. Now, I’m not too fussy when it comes to eating on aircraft, but it really was quite bad. The meat was tough and tasteless and dripping in water and grease (See attached photo). The cheese course was poor (again see attached photo). Dessert was a small cake type thing.

And that was it for the thirteen and a half hour flight until breakfast. When breakfast was served, again by the stewards using a trolley and individually serving the food onto the plate, it was actually quite nice. The omelette tasted fresh as opposed to the normal rubbery effect you get on most airlines.

Semolina medallions au gratin with Taleggio cheese and red chicory


Mixed grill and vegetables with extravirgin olive oil and fresh rosemary



Cheese


Dessert


Fine herb omelette with mushrooms, tomatoes and grilled bacon


Cabin crew
This was the first flight I’ve been on where two of the cabin crew had very visible tattoo’s on their bodies. I’m not against them per se, but when one stewards neck is covered in them, and the other has them on their hands, then it doesn’t set the correct tone IMHO. The crew (mainly men) were generally friendly, but I got the impression that they wanted to just do their job and then close the curtains to the galley.

Arrival
We arrived at the gate in sunny Buenos Aires 37 minutes behind schedule. Deboarding was via an airbridge.


Crossing the River Plate just north of Buenos Aires


About 15 minutes before landing we passed overhead Ezeiza airport.


Delta flight 101 from Atlanta touching down about 15 minutes before we did.


Turning for final approach, the early morning mist still present.


Overall
I’m not looking forward to my next Alitalia flight in business from Rome to Buenos Aires in June, put it that way.

graraps

Nice report. Thank goodness my AZ flights (if I take them) on the CMB deal are shorter.
I thought the AZ 777 actually had lieflat seats! What was the seat like for sleeping?

Were there any midflight snacks available?

Mofomat

No, not lie flat. Cradle.

They are not that nice for sleeping in because of the material. I kept sliding around on the leather. Also I seemed to get very sweaty, very quickly. I've just deboarded a Delta 763 in Atlanta in Business Elite (leather seats) and I didn't have that problem.

I didn't see any food being served or even made available between the dinner course finishing and the breakfast being served. I did sleep for a bit of the flight, but I'm pretty certain the crew just disappeared for much of the flight. Not very good for what is getting on for a 14 hour flight and nearly 7,000 miles. This was my longest distance flight to date.

CarlTheWebmaster

Nice report Mofomat, thanks for the info!

As an aside, the pictures looked great -- very clear and detailed. I wonder though if you could perhaps post smaller ones next time? On my screen the large photos make it hard to read the posts without horizontal scrolling. Maybe you could add a little mo' fo[r]mat to them !! (sorry it is very late as I write this )

-C

Mofomat

Sure, although I'm not sure what you mean by [r]? Is that a way to make the pics smaller?

TrayflowInUK

Agree with CarltheWebmaster... I don't have many pet peeves, but it is very difficult to read TRs when the pics are so big. No problem when my laptop's on the docking station at work (19-inch monitor) but a real issue when at home or on the road, where it is whenever I'm reading FT! And that's a shame because I love TRs with pictures!

As far as how to do it, I usually downsize them batchwise (I use iview, it's shareware or freeware, can't remember which, and you can download it from tucows). Or if you figure out your picture website (I use flickr) you can link to a lower-size pic, usually 640 x 480 does the trick. There are probably easier ways

And, by the way, nice trip report. It's a shame AZ is such a poor airline... fits well with Skyteam, the "everyone else" alliance!

CarlTheWebmaster

Sorry, a bad pun. mofomat --> mo' fo[r]mat --> "more format". As in, "more formatting" i.e., smaller photos.

Sorry again, it was late.

More to the point, one thing I do when I have a lot of photos to resize is to use a windows XP hack/workaround. I open a windows explorer window and select all the photos, then choose "email selected items" from the "File and Folder Tasks" link on the left side of the window:


Then windows asks me if I want to resize the photos:


I choose 'small' and the pictures are the right size. Then I save the attachments from the email message (I usually just delete the email message at this point), and upload the saved, resized messages to the Photo Gallery on Flyertalk.

Here's an example:


This is 640x480 pixels -- the original was 2816x2112 pixels.

Clear as mud???

-C

Bretteee

The meal you got looks terrible. And the portions so tiny. I think the Y meals are better. As to the tatoos at least it's entertaining. On Swiss I once saw 2 stewards on the same flight with earings in their ears which was amusing.

Bretteee

Bretteee

The pictures look beautiful on my computer.

Mofomat

I had a go at making them smaller. How do they look now?

CarlTheWebmaster

WOW!!! Perfect! I will point to this TR as a sample by which others should be measured.

Now I just wish you had some photos of the FA tatoos!

-C