Flight Log of VietJet Flight 569 from Hanoi to Hue
After a forty minute minivan ride, we were at Noi Bai Airport and ready for our flight to Hue.
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The minivan dropped us off outside the domestic T1, which was old and dim. There was renovation going on inside the building, so it's unpleasantly noisy. The old T1 was mainly occupied by Vietnam Airlines, with all the other low cost carriers in the nearby and newly constructed T1E. There were corridors connecting the two buildings both before and after security, but it seemed that the passage after security wasn't open yet.
When booking this VietJet ticket (which was probably the only mid-day flight from Hanoi to Hue), what I found interesting was that travel agencies was offering a lower rate than VietJet's website by waiving the so call "credit card processing fee" of 55k VND. However, I couldn't access travel agency booking online, so there's no way to add checked bags to it. Thus my mom and I ended up in separate bookings, but we were still able to check two 8kg bags on one "20kg" bag purchase.
It was early lunch time and we happened to find that all the restaurants in T1E were offering Pho at the same price as downtown. Even with lots of magical cilantro, it didn't taste as nice though.
About the actual flight, I saw a few days back in FlightRadar24 that VN-A651 which was Airbus' 9000th aircraft seemed to be serving this route a lot. And luck was on my side that day.
Airbus' 9000th aircraft, my plane to Hue.
As a terminal designed for low cost carriers, there's no jet bridge in T1E. And since the plane's parked with starboard facing the terminal, for which the Vietnamese determined it's too dangerous for passengers to walk around the plane to board from the port side. As a result of that, we took a 200-meter shuttle ride around the plane, and I would bet it would be the shortest airport shuttle bus ride of my lifetime.
Heavy Vietnam Airlines presence, mostly narrowbody in this photo though.
After a short taxi around the airport, we were airborne.
Just North of Noi Bai Airport.
After that, it was cloudy all the way to Hue. At around 300 meters, cloud base above Hue was really low that day, which meant there wasn't much sight until right before landing.
Vortexes clearly visible in such humid weather.
That splashed all these water on the runway.
One interesting fact was that, the shuttle buses of Phu Bai Airport were completely imported from China to a degree that the Vietnamese didn't bother to change the language of LED displays, which wasn't a welcoming sight.
And as we were waiting for our checked bags in this tiny airport, I could see departing passengers a wall away boarding the same shuttle bus, while porters separated by another wall were loading bags onto belts, which reminded me of Beijing Nanyuan Airport (NAY) with similar baggage systems. Well, in this case the sophisticated Chinese workers at Nanyuan (NAY) certainly beat the Vietnamese in efficiency, as I witnessed how the first bags at NAY beat the first passengers from shuttle to the belt.
Phu Bai Airport was serviced by shuttle buses to/from downtown Hue that matched airline arrival/departure times. But since it's still some distance to our hotel in Hue, we called a taxi instead.
END