Flight Log of Air China Flight 1275 from Beijing Capital to Urumqi on October 14th, 2016

On a weekend on October, 2016, I visited Urumqi to take the TOEFL exam. For the outbound flight I chose Air China Flight CA1275.

The images in this post are hosted on Imgur. Email me should there be any display problems.

I won’t go in length why I needed to travel half a nation to Urumqi to take a TOEFL exam. In short, I don’t like to reserve a TOEFL slot to early (fixing it down means too much pressure for me), and those slots were hot in China. So when it’s time for me to pick in late September, I was picking between Changchun, Urumqi and Hong Kong. I’ve been to Changchun and Hong Kong, so picked Urumqi.

Usually, the default way for me to get to and from Beijing Airport is Metro Line 4/10 and Metro Airport Express. But given that this time I would arrive in Beijing at midnight, and the only way besides taxi to get back in town by then would be Airport Bus to Friendship Hotel(友谊宾馆), and there’s no easy way from there to get back to dormitory. So this time I transferred my bike to the campus of Renmin University of China in advance, so after getting off that Airport Bus I could ride my bike back. But that meant I didn’t have my bike to ride to the metro station on my trip to the airport. So I went online and found that there’s bus from National Exhibition Center of Metro Line 15 to Beijing Airport, and Metro lines 4 and 15 were of similar distance from my dormitory, so why not try something new and nearly miss my flight?
The scheduled departure time of flight CA1275 is 1125. That morning I was delayed by my roommate a little bit, so it was already 0835 by the time I left the dormitory, and 0905 when I reached the metro station of Line 15, (details omitted), and ran like hell in Terminal 3 to reach the self-check-in machine by 1038 and printed out my boarding pass, which was 2 minutes before the check-in deadline set of Air China. (I had already check-in online, so I didn’t know whether I could print my boarding pass or not after the check-in deadline. Anyway, this was pretty much a close call. )
P.S. In fact I could print my own boarding pass after checking-in online. But I didn’t bother yesterday, plus the PDF file generated by Air china was miserably misaligned (like something from the last century). Had I already printed my own boarding pass, I didn’t need to hurry at all since the previous flight arrived late.
P.P.S.S. I wasn’t sure whether Chinese airport securities accept the bar on a cell-phone screen (since this plus ID card was all that they ever cared about), it yes then again I didn’t need to hurry.
P.S.P.S. A more seasoned classmate of mine couldn’t believe my experience of nearly missing my flight as we talked about it. In his opinion the fastest way to get to Beijing Airport from our dormitory was with Metro Line 15.

Then about prices, 840 CNY for a single trip from Beijing to a city farther than Hong Kong is by no means expensive, (As a comparison, Hong Kong Airlines was offering Beijing-Hong Kong return at 11XX CNY with unfavorable slots, which was very very cheap. But since I had never been to Urumqi, why not try it?)，especially concerning this was a pretty good slot. Albeit 840CNY was the most expensive domestic flight ticket that’s purchased on my own expense.

I lost a toothpaste in the late-arrival security lines (I planned to check that bag. But since I arrived at the airport late, and the lines at Air China baggage counters were quite formidable, I killed that thought.) Gate C20 was the farthest in Terminal 3C, but since the plane arrived late, I got time to have a drink, regroup myself before boarding time.

So after waiting at the end of runway 36R for 10 minutes (in which time there were only two landings) we were finally able to leave behind the air pollution of Beijing. As usual, all the photos in the air were processed for contrast.GPS Tracking on Wikiloc





More than 10 years of service of that Boeing 738 plane meant the window shade on my left was particularly stubborn. That plus the sun was shining all the way onto the my side of the plane meant I kept the window shade down for the majority of the flight, and took few photos.

When checking-in line and choosing between “right-side with no view” and “left-side with Tianshan(天山) Ranges but direct sunshine”, I picked the latter. Unfortunately, it was very much cloudy in Urumqi, and the clouds went as high as 400 meters. So Bogda Peak was all that’s left of the Tianshan Ranges.














During landing I saw a Xiamen Air B738 with “100th Boeing of Xiamen Air” taxiing, but I didn’t have the time to grab my camera.

And Air China managed to get a gate at the center of Urumqi Airport Terminal 2, which was convenient for both arrival and departure. #NationalFlagCarrier
Then I walked out of the airport, followed the signs and reached the bus station. I won’t discuss here how I took the wrong bus and was driven mad by it.
END

Flight Log of Air China Flight 1275 from Beijing Capital to Urumqi on October 14th, 2016 by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.