Flight Log of China Southern Airlines Flight 3138 from Beijing Capital to Wuhan on December 7th, 2016

I was suddenly informed by my parents that I needed to go to the city of Wuhan(武汉) to sort out some family matters, and that was one day before my trip. Immediately I went online searching for tickets, and found tickets for overnight sleeper trains were sold out (apart from the ones that arrive at 4 in the morning), yet airlines were still quoting around 300+CNY for morning flights to Wuhan. So with little hesitation I booked China Southern’s morning flight to Wuhan.

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And GPS tracking is here.

I took a Di-Di(滴滴) ride to the airport. I left my school campus at 4 and got inside the terminal at 4:40, which left me marveling at how wonderful the city of Beijing can be without traffic jam.
For my 6:45 flight this was very early, the security-check lines were just opening.

Then, I killed one hour of waiting time by hurrying on my homework (not the most comfortable way of killing time). In accordance with my tradition of always forgetting something each trip, this time the instant noodles that some neighboring nannies happily enjoyed reminded me of the grave fact that I had forgotten to bring my breakfast chips.

By the way this was my 51st takeoff, as I celebrated it with a special Facebook post.

That day the whole China was in serious air pollution, beyond the redemption capabilities of Adobe CameraRaw. Plus I was pretty drowsy from not sleeping getting up early to catch this morning flight, so I took few photos on the way.

Then about this Wuhan Airport. My first impression towards it was, it’s got enough to handle it current traffic volume, unless it has got zero management, so why built a new terminal? Even when they say the current terminal hasn’t got enough jet bridges for the planes to spend the night, building a new T3 that’s twice the size of current T2, with the only taxiway between the two terminals way South of them at the end of the airport, didn’t they know how much the taxiways of Shanghai Pudong(PVG) Airport sucks? (This time it was 10 minutes between leaving runway 04R and parked at jet bridge.)

Then something about Di-Di(滴滴) app at Wuhan Airport. In a major US city, I never waited for more than 10 seconds to drivers on Uber or Lyft to accept my ride request. But Di-Di which copied most of these two apps except name somehow thought in China, they should work on “reservation” rather than wait time (as they probably figured their customers were those most price-sensitive that cared nothing about time). So this time in Wuhan Airport I tried “reserved” two Di-Di rides, both driver asked me to go to a specific spot to meet them(given this was an airport where they couldn’t drive around at will, no complaints on that), then demanded I pay them extra with various excuses. After learning I would rather strictly adhere to the apps, they reluctantly cancelled my ride. Conclusion, the whole “reservation” thing on Di-Di equals to grabbing customers first, no matter whether to actually deliver them.

So after I grew totally disappointed with Chinese Car-sharing apps, I changed to intercity railway. By the way although the current Terminal of Wuhan Airport was less than 100 meters from the railway station, but with a construction zone in between (and Chinese constructions were not the most civilized type), the airport authorities required all transit passengers to take their shuttle bus, which ran on a pre-determined time schedule to fill as many people as possible.

The railway experience was without any hitch, until the very last moment I found my dad had bought me the wrong ticket (a Dec 8th ticket on Dec 7th). Since the station enforced its no-man-all-machine rule, both at the ticket check and at the ticket booth, so I was forced to go back to the airport terminal and take the Airport Shuttle thatr had gained more “dislikes” than “likes” online.
So I got on the over-crowded shuttle bus once again among a bunch of local nannies from Xiaogan. Oh, since the shuttle crossed a “Chinese” construction site and the bus was never cleaned, the bus interior wasn’t much less dusty than the construction going outside.

At the shuttle bus station, I bought a 11 o’clock shuttle bus to Wuhan Railway Station which ran on 20-minute interval at exactly 10:37. (Although the bus left at 10:51, otherwise I would be going nuts.)

END

Flight Log of China Southern Airlines Flight 3138 from Beijing Capital to Wuhan on December 7th, 2016 by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.