Flight Log of All Nippon Airways Flight 955 from Tokyo Narita to Beijing on May 9th, 2017
On the afternoon of May 9, my friend and I travelled on 5 trains for 5 hours covering 171.2 km and reached Tokyo Narita Airport from Gora, Hakone to conclude this eleven-day journey to Japan.
The images in this post are hosted on Imgur. Email me should there be any display problems. When booking this trip we found that All Nippon Airways offered similar prices for our return trip from either Narita or Haneda. But the flight from Haneda left in the morning and the one from Narita at dusk. By choosing Narita we got an extra day to spend in Japan
Unfortunately, one of the five legs of train was delayed, so we arrived at Narita Airport at 16:53 which was 20 minutes later than what we planned for. Given there's not much time to our scheduled departure time of 1820 and there's quite some lines at JR travel agency, we didn't return our Suica Card.
It was a smooth experience going through securities and border at Narita Airport with little time spent in lines. After reaching our gate we still got time to finish some snacks we bought in the day.
Thai Airways A380/All Nippon Airways B77W/United Airlines B77E
Our plane was parked on the apron that day, so my friend and I calculated the time to join the queue, which made us one of the last passengers to board the first shuttle (which made us one of the first to board the plane).
Our shuttle waited by the plane for quite some time before boarding. I'm not sure whether that's to wait for the cabin to be cleaned, or for the second shuttle to arrive. (I thought it was stupid in either case.)
The load factor that day was typical ANA. I was sitting in row 32 and there're at least 6 rows behind me with at most 6 passengers seated, it wasn't a crowded plane in front of me either.
Then about fare, all-inclusive roundtrip fare between Beijing and Japan in class L at 2500JPY seemed to be the lowest ANA's willing to offer, I couldn't think of anybody else that's reluctant to reduce prices with load factor this low.
Off to Chicago
To improve runway efficiency, a plane as light as us were directed to runway 16L which was only 2000 meters long due to holdouts. It's a 20-minute taxi from apron by Terminal 1 to the end of runway 16L around the entire Narita Airport, which was way to familiar to Chinese airports.
Although the plane is only five years old, the resolution of this camera was still terrible.
While I was taking these pictures during takeoff, I felt there's something wrong with the photos. Moments later I realized it's the unpleasant reflection of the windows... Then I was aware that the whole cabin was brightly illuminated.
Then I searched online and found ANA as a Skytrax five star airline didn't require cabin lights to be dimmed during takeoff and landing, which was quite problematic in my opinion.
I emailed my complaint that ANA did not dim cabin lights during takeoff and landing.
On the lower-right corner was what used to be Katori Air Base.
I picked beef rice, which was better than Yoshinoya with the absence of onions that I hate.
At least for this meal we got a menu to choose from.
And ANA did pay great attention to detail. They got a layer of rubber on the surface of dinner tray, so that the food boxes won't slip easily.
The Tientsin Eye and Former Italy Concession Land
I emailed my complaint that ANA did not dim cabin lights during takeoff and landing.
Then given the strange Japanese visa requirements I need to send our travel agency our arrival stamp. But when I painstaking turned my passport to the page of my Japanese visa and handed it to the immigration officer, I found he gave me a stamp on a random empty page, and in doing this wasted two of my passport pages. It seemed that fewer than half of my passport pages were empty?
END