FlyerTalk Forums - ROYAL FIRST CLASS ON THAI (REALLY)

My story involving the King and Queen of Tonga is that during summer 1998, I was taking the evening flight from SFO-HNL. Got to gate 80 and noticed a couple of SFPD hanging around.

That in and of itself was out of place. My colleague and I were booked in F, we moved to get ready for boarding and were nearby the cops. My colleague asked them why they were there. They said they could not say, but we would understand why in a few minutes.

A couple of minutes later, an entourage of very large people accompanied by US Secret Service arrived at the gate and boarded the 741.

This was one of the planes that were formerly 3 class that they modified with that stupid configuration whereby they put *6* rows of those old gray C seats up in the nose of the plane, and converted the rest of the plane to Y (not sure what they did upstairs). JAL C HNL-KIX only had 5 rows in the nose at the time. This whole program was under the guise, IIRC, of creating more Y seats to be available to Hawaii for award travel.

Back to the story. The rest of the plane was then allowed to board. We got to our seats and saw that part of the entourage was milling about in F. A "lady in waiting" type placed some sort of cloths over 1A and 1B and what turned out to be the royals came and sat down. It was interesting to see them get waited on by both the FAs and their handlers.

The Secret Service guys (I think there were 4-6 of them stayed busy playing with their earpieces. A couple of them looked like they were about 22 years old, not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just my observation over whom was chosen to protect foreign dignitaries (or at least these foreign dignitaries). There was some confusion over what frequency they were to communicate over once we were to land and for them to hook up with their HNL-based counterparts. We landed and got off first, so that was the last we saw.