Hi fellow fters.
Just a brief report on United Airways (from Bangladesh).
- United operates A310, MD's, ATR 72's and I believe also DHC's. The airlines has its own Pilot training school in Dhaka. Besides domestic flights (Chittagong, Silhet, Cox Bazaar, Jossore and some other place) they also have flights to Calcutta, and I believe KL and S'pore (not sure tough).
Check-in in DAC (domestic) is a very simple affair, the terminal is barely 30 x 30 meters, including landside and airside. Bags are collected in the counter, and cardboard boarding passes (without names indicated) are given handwritten. I've seen passengers arrive to the terminal and check-in less than 5 minutes to scheduled departure. Hard to beat the convenience!
Price for a DAC-CTA about 100 euros (changeable against a fee + class difference, so not really cheap for a 300 km hop).
Security is quick and bottles with liquids are not taken from pax.
Boarding is done by bus.
Flew DAC-CTG-DAC a couple of times with them on ATR 72's. The planes I flew had markings left from CSA, Euro-lot and some Indonesian or Malaysian airlines. One aircraft had fabric upholstery, another one leather upholstery. Both aircrafts dirty inside and outside to the point of being almost disgusting.
Upper consoles where dirty with missing panels and non working lights. On one of the aircraft the windows where quite blurry (small cracking).
Whereas United has some of the prettiest Bangladeshi FA's I've seen, they seem quite uninspired and almost bothered to be on board. United however "excels" in one are: catering. It consists of a paper box with 5 items: 1 small cake, 1 bag of fried peas, 1 mango bar (quite good)and 1 pack of salty crackers as well as a small tetra pack with mango juice. For a 40 minute flight is quite ok and better than AF salty/Savory or IB's nothing de nothing.
They also have their own inflight magazine. No way to get miles.
Passengers are checked before takeoff, but no safety check is done upon landing.
By all standards, flying with them beats driving down to Chitta (about 6 hours of a very scary roller coaster like experience with mad bus and truck drivers pushing you out of the road and overtaking on a single lane whether opposite traffic is coming or not).
One point that I would like to check is if it is common to patch propeller blades in the way shown on the photo. On my last flight I noticed most blades had been patched in a similar way and caused me some concern. Comments from knowledgeable people would be welcome.
Cheers
