Flight Log of All Nippon Airways Flight 980 from Beijing to Osaka Kansai on April 29th, 2017

Chinese Labor Day Holiday in May, 2017. After discussions with my undergraduate classmates, we decided that this should be the time for our graduation trip, and we chose Japan as our destination.
During the reservation process, we found that All Nippon Airways (ANA) could offer us a relatively cheap Japan domestic legs in its return tickets, so we chose an itinerary of Beijing – Osaka – Tokyo – Beijing with ANA, the first leg of which is NH980 from Beijing to Osaka.

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Since we were a group of 25 people, we booked a bus on Taobao to take us to the airport from school campus for our 2pm flight.
It turned out that such bus services wasn’t that much reliable. We agreed on 1030 pickup time, at 10am the driver called: is it 1130??
And since it’s Chinese Labor Day Holiday, I witnessed the worst traffic jam on Beijing Airport expressway, although my times were limited on the airport expressway.

And during the reservation process, given that each of us had different preferred return day, which corresponded to different air fares, 8 of us were booked on a Shenzhen Airlines flight leaving an hour earlier (under Air China code). However, that flight was cancelled by Shenzhen Airlines, and we managed to put those guys onto the ANA flight, which was different to Air China’s long-standing image in my mind as a fossil state-owned company.

After Boarding Pass I went downstairs to retrieve our personal WiFi. To reach arrival hall from departure hall at Beijing Airport, it’s either waiting for an elevator that would never came, or walking all the way to the end of the terminal for an escalator.

And the guy at security check logically greeted me with 10+ personal WiFi’s as a tour guide…

FlightRadar24 indicated that NH980 was usually operated by Boeing 737. But as the first day of Chinese Labor Day holiday, the flight was operated by a larger B763, yet was still overbooked. So my friend got bumped to business, only because he added his newly registered ANA Mileage account number.

Then about this strange meal services. By ANA script, they would provide a perpetually unchanged menu for customers to choose from. But it seemed that this flight hasn’t got one, so what one got to eat was solely determined by the moods of the cabin crew.
By comparison, last summer I flew on QR246 from Istanbul to Doha, which didn’t get a menu either. But the crew onboard would patiently tell each one of us the offerings and asked about our choices. So this services was far beneath ANA’s public reputation.

< Given the prevalent tailwind, it just took a couple of Naruto episodes at 3x speed to kill the two hours of flying time, until ear pain reminded me that we were descending. According to my cell phone, the cabin pressure reached sea level when we were still at 4000 meters.

After witnessing an awesome sunset at Kansai Airport it was an equally awesome queue at immigration. Japanese immigration officers’ persistence on trivial details like telephone numbers, so that the queues only budged forward.
To make matters worse, there’s no GPS nor cellular signal in the immigration hall of Kansai Airport, so there’s no good games like Pokemon Go for me to kill the time.

After that, I bought some rail passes at the Airport Tourist Information Center, and rode Nankai Electric Railway downtown.
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Flight Log of All Nippon Airways Flight 980 from Beijing to Osaka Kansai on April 29th, 2017 by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.