KL803

Part 6: HKG-ZRH

LX139 (scheduled departure 22.55 HKT – actual 23.22, arrival 06.10 CEST actual 06.17) (Stats: flightstats.com)

This never happened to me before: Nobody welcoming me aboard! But as we entered the Swiss A343 through door 1L, there was nobody, no purser, no flight attendant. Uhm, very strange. It turned out, that we were the last first-class passengers to board, so we took our seats 2 D/G. It didn't take long and a FA came to us and welcomed us – belated – on board. A pre-departure amouse-buche and champagne was served.


LX 1st cabin


LX 1st pre-departure snack

After 5 minutes or so, the chief-purser came along, too, to wish us a friendly welcome aboard. It was my first flight on LX since 2002, so it actually felt a bit strange to talk to the crew in my native tongue. That was a weird experience for me. The captain came on and informed us about a delay of about 30 minutes but also insured us a pretty on-time landing in ZRH due to favorable winds. Flight time would be close to 13 hrs, this is because LX has to circumnavigate Russian airspace on this route.

Soon after take-off, dinner service started.

This was the menu:


Once again, my wife and I chose to take dinner tête-à-tête, which is a very nice option on both LX and TG.


Lobster filled pancake


Smoked salmon confit, cucumber salad and crème fraîche


Fresh garden salad


Vegetable cannelloni with tomato sauce


”Züri-Gschnätzlets” (veal Zurich-style with Rösti)


Red wine poached pear with pear jelly white chocolate ice cream


Macallan Fine Oak 18yrs

The food was excellent and service extremely friendly but not exaggerated, just perfect. One could criticize that LX has a less international catering, on the other hand, that's why a lot of people choose LX. For my wife and me, it was very much OK. After dinner, the crew prepared our beds, and this is a big difference to TG: There's real bedding and a feather blanket which makes the sleeping experience much nicer.


LX bed

A word about IFE: I didn't use it much, after dinner I slept pretty straight for more than 8 hours, so I didn't use it much. The screen is a bit small, movie selection much less than on UA and SQ about equal to TG. There were noise-canceling ear-phones, but I didn't wear them for sleeping, that's just too uncomfortable, good old ear-plugs did the job.

When I woke up, we were already over Hungarian airspace, less than two hours before landing.


Flight map

So it was time for a real Swiss breakfast:


Muesli, Zopf, croissant

That was wonderful, but the omelette with hash-browns was pretty awful, it tasted like rubber, the potatoes were still raw and cold, the sausage and ham were the only edible things on this plate.


Awful omelette

Soon after we finished breakfast, we already started our descent into ZRH where we arrived just a few minutes behind schedule. We said bye bye to the very friendly crew and made our way to immigration and baggage claim. Priority tags worked very well, we collected our bags within 5 minutes and were on our way home in no time. We reached home exactly one hour after touch down.