Flight Log of Qatar Airways Flight 142 / 896 from Barcelona to Beijing via Doha on February 17th, 2017
Three days of Barcelona shall round off my four week's roaming the world, and it's about time I get back to school before the registration period ended for my last undergraduate semester.
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During this trip my camera totally broke down, so I took all the photos with my cell phone.
There had been some issues with the return tickets of Aerobus, as the round-trip tickets I purchased three days ago weren't where they were supposed to be (I won't blame myself given how many receipts I had with myself at that time). The problem was resolved with some good rummage of my suitcase.
We arrived at Barcelona Airport a little more than two hours before flight, and amazingly, there weren't many people waiting at the check-in counters (well, this wasn't Spanish at all).
Since neither of us was interested in shopping, we went right past passport control, after which there weren’t any shops.
This time we took off on Runway 25L with immediate left turn (predictable given the prevalent west wind), which meant there wasn't much sight of the spectacular city of Barcelona.
GPS tracks of QR142 arehere.
Beef Potato and Beans
Well, first time to use jet bridge for arrival at Doha.
It was a five-hour long transit at Doha for my flight to Beijing at 11am (I guess this is because Qatar Airways couldn't manage to get a better landing slot at Beijing), as I watched a bustling airport turned quiet after the morning rush while watching Japanese animations.
One thing to mention, it seemed that Doha airport changed its WiFi policy. It used to be that as long as you can connect to its "Complimentary-WiFi" you would get Internet access. Now they replaced that with a new "Hashtag-Complimentary-WiFi", which was authenticated with Qatar Airways PNR. Well, if the WiFi was indeed sponsored by Qatar Airways, calling it "Qatar-Airways-Complimentary-WiFi" would hurt non-Qatar-Airways passengers less.
With downtown Doha in the distance.
It was a bumpy ride that day throughout the whole climb over Persian Gulf, with meal services being interrupted several times for turbulence.
The gentleman cabin crew
After lunch I slept all the way into China, woke up just before dinner time.
I picked beef and rice, although the same gentleman cabin crew still insisted chicken.
One aspect I wasn't so fond of Qatar Airways on these trips, it seemed that there was always this gap between the second meal services and landing. This was particular on this flight into Beijing, when they retrieved all the food trays and shut the lights for more than an hour before turning them on again for landing preparation.
Unfortunately, that night we landed in the wrong runway of Beijing Airport which was 36L. And the incompetent Chinese airport controllers recently learned that the only way to prevent runway incursions like the Hongqiao ones was to not cross runway at all. So we taxied all the way around the airport, and reached our gate 24 minutes after landing, even if there wasn't any traffic jam on the taxiways.
The incompetence of Beijing Airport didn't stop at its controllers, as I waited at the belt for nearly an hour for my checked bags. No, Beijing doesn't have the stupid baggage drop systems like the Shanghai ones, it's just incompetence.
END