Okinawa is not a particularly easy place to get to from Europe. A minimum of one stop is required from anywhere. The obvious route from the UK is LHR-HKG-OKA on Cathay, at 6901 miles and (usually) reasonably-priced. You can also fly via Tokyo for less than 100 miles extra, but this involves significant compromises on timings, or a change of airport. Flying through Seoul would lop the mileage down to 6300, but the timings simply didn’t work. Flying through Shanghai or Beijing would shorten the journey still further, but you don’t seem to be able to buy a ticket too easily.

So, if I needed to stop at least once to get there on an alliance I don’t collect miles from, I may as well stop twice on an alliance that will do me some good, particularly if I can coincidentally snag a leg on the (eight abreast ANA) 787 on the way home. And if I can “complete the set” of A320-family aircraft by picking up the A321, so much the better. I somehow end up with the above routing, which was plus or minus £10 difference in fare compared to Cathay, but allowed me to get to Okinawa in time to attend my conference’s welcome reception. The only thing was, there was a 7:30am first flight. The sensible thing would be to take a hotel close to Heathrow, but I elected to spend a couple of hours in my own bed and take a coach from Bridgwater at 2:40am instead.

My smartphone has an app that uses the microphone as a noise reader, and I had intended to use this to quantifiably measure just how quiet the Dreamliner’s cabin was. The only trouble is, it’s not sensitive enough to discriminate between cabin and general background noise at cruise. It measured the noise at take-off as being lower in the 787, but that might simply be a function of me having sat over the wing. Don’t worry, I will go on to give my qualitative judgement.


Dreamliner in cruise (L) and my office (R)

And on the subject of smartphones, I’ll go on to make my excuses for the quality of the photos in this report: since I would be away over Halloween, I left my better half with the better camera so she could get a few snaps of the kids all dressed up. What you have here are taken on my phone (With one or two glaring exceptions).