I was lucky enough to fly F on JA01WJ today so I thought I'd share a few thoughts about the product.
- Flawless soft product, food/wine/crew was amazing
- Visually, the cabin is stunning. I actually really like the colors and finishes.
- It's hard to describe the amount of space that every seat has, I find that pictures really don't do it justice. It's REALLY big, especially the TV. It felt like watching a movie on a home theater.
- Full of cool tech, I enjoyed the in-seat speaker although I wish it got a bit louder.
- Overall it's a really comfortable seat no matter how you're sitting, bed is very large.
- The walls are so high that the flight attendants have trouble seeing what you're doing, there was a few funny moments where the FA was trying to peek over the door to see if I was done with my plate
- I feel bad for the FAs when setting up the table, that thing is HEAVY. A proper workout to get it out
Now that I got the good part out of the way... I read about the quality control issues they had with the seats and I was curious to see for myself, somewhat hopeful that it was overblown. It's not overblown, it's bad. Like really bad.
There were so many different issues I noticed with the seat (some very minor, some less) that I wrote down a list on my phone while on the flight:
- Overall, the seat is just really flimsy. The headrest of the side seat had a lot of wiggle, if you move your body, you feel the whole seat wiggling. When moving the seat position, there's a lot of noise and just feels like it's about to break. Sometimes you have to try to recline the seat multiple times to get it to work.
- The lighting/seat control buttons stopped working mid flight, so I couldn't change the position of the seat nor turn off the lights which was a bit awkward when trying to sleep. The crew was very apologetic and tried unsuccessfully to fix it (it was their first time on this aircraft I believe) and made my bed in another empty seat, but warned me that the other seat's tablet was broken (lol). Luckily after about an hour, the controls magically fixed themselves and I was able to control the lights!
- The tablet allows you to control seat positions and every lighting element of your seat, and even setup lighting scenes, which is really cool! Except none of it worked, I couldn't control the lights with the tablet nor the seat position.
- Safety briefing video wouldn't play (although maybe just a one-off glitch)
- No power on any plugs in my seat
- Aircraft cameras were non functional
- The tablet dock kept making weird sounds, it's like the locking mechanism was constantly being activated.
- Some pretty obvious visual imperfections on the seat finishes, mostly in the joints between fabrics/panels.
This sounds like a lot but ultimately most of it is pretty minor stuff and I still had an amazing experience which I would definitely love to have again. But it makes me concerned about the longevity of the product when it's so run down on delivery. I really don't know how Safran managed to ship a seat with this many issues.