I was fortunate to find an 80K mile AA award seat on this past Wednesday's JL12 from Haneda to DFW. While it was a pleasant flight and the new suite has lots of great features, I'm not sure that JAL's A350-1000 is worth some of the effusive fanboy/Lucky-like hype I’ve read. Here are my objective observations and thoughts, both the positive and negative…
After the nice private Haneda First Class check-in "lounge" and security, ground F service is weak to non-existent. The Sakura First Class Lounge is mediocre, sadly overrun with non First Class OW passengers and no special area for true First Class passengers.
And then there is the JAL boarding process with no pre-boarding for First Class passengers, just queue and board with all the other Group 1 pax. Think United Group 1 boarding.
Tokyo HND to Dallas DFW
Japan Airlines JL12
A350-1000
10:55am-8:15am
May 1, 2024
Departed 6/6
Cost: 80,000 AA miles
Not exactly an exclusive boarding experience as only 2L was in operation today.
Lovely two row, six suite First Class cabin.
My home for the next 12 hours, one of the largest First Class suites in the skies.
Yeah, this will work. LOL.
Suite footprint is large and well planned for the most part. I had selected 1A for the extra window. The slightly smaller footprint from the curvature of the fuselage was not an issue as the overall space is plenty large. The single suite door only closes one way front to back which exposes you to 1D and vice versa. A double door or rear to front would have corrected that issue. Speaking of 1D, I’d hate to be sitting in either of those two middle seats as they seem dark and claustrophobic.
Good storage space for both my roller board and backpack.
The JAL A35-1000 has lots of new tech features although some don’t seem ready for prime time. Huge HD screen is awesome and really HD if you pick the correct recent movie like The Beekeeper. Anything else and it’s just enlarged non-HD which makes the distortion even worse than on a smaller screen. The electronic tablet was nice for controlling things although not all functions seem to work properly, especially Light settings. IMO, the in-seat speakers are a useless gimmick. Poor sound quality with no bass and not enough volume capability, which makes sense to avoid neighbors hearing each others audio. Once you’ve selected seat speakers, it’s is hard to switch to jack or Bluetooth (if that even works which it didn’t for me) without starting over and selecting a different movie. Wireless charging is a nice idea but virtually useless. Even when you find the sweet spot, charging is at a glacial speed. Perhaps without my iPhone case it would have been better but removing mine is a PIA. Wifi is painfully slow and you get kicked off after a few minutes of non use. Then it takes a few minutes to reconnect if at all. Movie favorites apparently disappear after a few hours of non activity. After my sleep, mine had all disappeared. On the other hand, the suite has lots of power options including 3 AC power outlets, 3 USB jacks and 3 USB A jacks.
Pre-departure champagne. You know it's not the good stuff when they just bring the glass from the galley. And confirmed when our FA showed me the bottle. One sip and done.
After takeoff, time to explore the nice at seat wireless tablet.
Nice options but... once you select, you can't unselect or change your selection without changing movies... twice.
As usual for JAL, weak and limited western movies selections. To make matters worse on the A350, you can’t get rid of the Japanese (or Chinese huh?) subtitles. I only found one movie (out of 12 that I tried) that had a "No Subtitles" option. The others just defaulted to Japanese or... Chinese Traditional subtitles, with no apparent way to unselect.
But with the right movie, the HD quality is extraordinary especially on this massive screen.
