Flight Log of Delta Airways Flight 129 from Seattle to Beijing Capital, and Diversion to Anchorage on November 5th, 2016

This post follows on the previous ones about flight DL129 from Los Angeles to Seattle.

Since the previous flight from Los Angeles departed pretty much on time, we arrived at Seattle half an hour early, which meant plenty of time to go just from one terminal to another by tram.

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

The good thing about having two consecutive flights on the same code was that, the layout at Seattle was reasonably short, yet with guarantee from the airline.

That afternoon Seattle Airport Terminal S was very much bustling, as there were multiple international flights ready to depart at that moment, including one Delta flight to Hong Kong that got delayed for more than half a day.

But nothing happened to our flight thus far, as our flight was boarded quickly and pushed back.

Not long after that we were flying over the clouds of rainy Seattle, then onto the Pacific Ocean.





Again, I feel I need to comment about this meal. I didn’t like it overall. It’s not that Delta Airlines didn’t care about catering onboard, but it seemed they were focusing on something totally irrelevant, like, offering cheese with three different brand names (there was even these annoying cheese in the lettuce), rather than making things more delicious.
Also, I’m not sure Delta is spending its money rightly. I saw on the flight from Beijing to Seattle that they were offering drinks with Japanese names on it, I saw on this flight that the apple juices and orange juices were served in cans. Well, these were obvious and better areas of cost-cut than actual food served onboard.

After dinner, I put on the wonderful eye shades (yes, that’s the only thing good about Delta) and fell asleep (Thank God the crew didn’t throw things onto my tray table and woke me up.). Until later I was suddenly interrupted by cabin broadcast, stating that there was a medical situation onboard, and we would be diverted to Anchorage. I turned on the screen in front of me, which showed that our flight was already flying back.

The cabin broadcast didn’t went on to discuss the detail of the medical situation, and didn’t ask whether there’s any doctor onboard. And there wasn’t any panic onboard (maybe everybody’s too sleepy to respond to that).

Again, I hated whoever lunatic at Delta’s tech department, that cut the original 21:9 movie down to 16:9 to fit in the screen rather than scale it down. And I sadly ran out of movies or videos on my cell phone, and that felt terrible.

Once we touched down on Anchorage, more misery to me as I found there’s no signal on my ultra.me network (which was a subsidiary of T-Mobile). So I had to borrow network from my neighbor, who used AT&T network.

Throughout the diversion, I had always feared that such a diversion would cost me the entire trip, as the crew could go overtime and we could be forced to spend the night in Anchorage. But luckily, the pilots sorted out this issue very fast, and we only spent one hour on the ground in Anchorage before setting off for Beijing again.

After that, I basically slept all the way back to Beijing. There were snack services, but I already knew they won’t be impressive.

The good thing about landing was that, we landed on the right runway, which was 36L. So it was a short taxi to Terminal 2.




Again, the good thing about Terminal 2 at Beijing Airport as a relatively small one was that, the checked bags came out relatively fast (in Chinese standards), and there wasn’t much of a line at the customs. So after that I jumped onto the airport express train and headed back to dormitory, thank God I made it before the last subway train of the day.
END

Flight Log of Delta Airways Flight 129 from Seattle to Beijing Capital, and Diversion to Anchorage on November 5th, 2016 by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.