So I booked a "mileage run" on Air China to make sure I'd earn 1K next year. It involved routing TPE-PEK-MEL. My TPE-PEK flight was about 4 hours. (Also, they parked the plane a 15 minute shuttle ride away from the actual terminal...lol) My usual conversion is something like "planes fly about 500 mph, so every hour is about 500 miles," which should mean that a 4 hour flight earns about 2000 miles. But when I was looking my mileage spreadsheet, I noticed that TPE-PEK earns only 1000 miles. "This doesn't make sense!" I said to myself. Then I checked flightaware and saw that TPE-PEK flight flies at only 300 mph! Surprisingly, PEK-MEL flies at the normal 500 mph. Both routes are A330-300s.
I guess Air China doesn't think it's important to get people quickly from Taipei to Beijing (perhaps for fuel costs). I thought this was interesting, because on all of my United flights, I've never observed a jet plane (i.e. A320+ or 737+) fly at anything less than near cruising speed.
And then I found out that 1K bonus miles (100% of base miles) doesn't apply to Air China. Wah
. At least the PQMs otherwise posted without trouble.