ZA102 sitting on the factory floor in June 2010. Photo by Jon Ostrower.
Jon Ostrower (via Flight Blogger) and Matt Cawby (via KPAE blog) have both confirmed that the 9th Boeing 787 Dreamliner (ZA102 – N1006F), will be taking flight from Paine Field tomorrow. Although Boeing doesn’t confirm the time of lift off, I assume it should be around 10am.
ZA102 will be the first Dreamliner to actually be delivered to an airline and fly passengers. It is painted in the All Nippon Airways (ANA) tail, but has a white body. It is expected that ANA will have a special livery for this Dreamliner.
If you are in the Seattle area and have Monday off, head on over to Paine Field and experience a Dreamliner taking off for the first time. The weather says it will most likely rain, but that shouldn’t stop you. I am hoping to try and do a live video feed via my iPhone, but we shall see how it goes. Follow Twitter for the updates on the first flight of ZA102.
We are all still waiting on Boeing’s updated delivery schedule for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner after ZA002’s fire. For more information on the rest of the 787 test fleet, check out Ostrower’s most recent blog.
We are getting closer and closer to the Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental’s first flight. Boeing is preparing for the date and on January 8th, completed their first practice flight of the actual airplane. No, you didn’t miss the first flight of the airplane, the test was totally done on the ground, in the Boeing factory.
This was the first time all all the onboard systems were tested at the same time during the factory gauntlet testing and everything went well.
From what I am seeing, we should be seeing the rollout of the plane maybe in the next few weeks and hopefully first flight shortly after that.
This is surely not the first time-lapse livery video we have seen, but this one is unique. Instead of starting the video of the aircraft being pulled into a paint hangar, we start the video with watching the actual Airbus A320 being manufactured. Probably my favorite part is seeing how they have to raise the nose, which lowers the tail, to get the A320 out of the manufacturing hangar (at about 2:35).
“In celebration of Air New Zealand’s long running support of rugby in New Zealand, our first new A320 will arrive in January sporting a sleek black livery complete with silver fern motif and Koru on its tail,” says Air New Zealand CEO Rob Fyfe. This is the seventeenth year that the airline has sponsored the New Zealand Rugby Football union.
The Superjet is a new regional jet that will compete in the 75-100 seat market. The aircraft saw its first flight on May 19, 2008, but still has not made their first delivery. Last I heard and still according to their website, they were expecting to deliver the first aircraft during the fourth quarter of 2010. However Ostrower is reporting that the airliner is expected to earn Russian certification by the end of this month and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) certification in 2012. The Superjet has almost 200 orders and the first will be delivered to Aeroflot Armavia (updated: first two go to Armavia, then Aeroflot will get their first)
Recently Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin put pressure on Aeroflot and their subsidiaries to purchase more Russian-built aircraft to help with their fleet modernization versus Airbus and Boeing. Currently Aeroflot has 40 Superjets on order with an option for 15 additional.
Frontier Airlines Airbus A320 (N204FR) at snowy Denver with "Freedom" the Bald Eagle on the tail.
I was hoping to do a review of Frontier on an Airbus A320 from Seattle (SEA) to Denver (DIA) and then on a Bombardier Q400 from DIA to Aspen (ASE). However, life doesn’t always work out how we plan it. I was heading to Aspen to fly on a Beechcraft Starship, but snow had other plans and while in Denver, my flight to Aspen was canceled. Instead of taking a low-level flight on a Q400 to beautiful Aspen, I got to hop on another Airbus A320 back to Seattle (Note: I paid out of pocket for my flight on Frontier).
Not being able to fly the Q400 into Aspen and not fly on the Starship was bad, but for reviewing the Frontier Airlines experience, this actually worked out better. For my flight to DIA, I had to get up at 3:45am to catch my 6:15am flight out of Seattle. Before we left the gate I was asleep and woke up during the final 10 minutes. The flight back to Seattle provided me a better opportunity to review the flight and service.
When booking my flights 99% of the time I end up purchasing the tickets on the airline’s website, since it is normally the cheapest. In this case, it turned out to be about $20 cheaper to get my ticket through Orbitz — whatever, it works for me. When buying a ticket you have three choices: Economy, Classic and Classic Plus. The more you pay, the more features you get like free checked bags, free TV, and the ability to sit in seats with more legroom (check out the differences). Check-in and printing off the boarding pass were pretty standard and I was lucky enough to get a window seat, 27A, on the flight to DIA.
Every seat back has a little TV to watch movies and television, for a fee.
One of the fun parts of flying on Frontier is wondering what animal will be on the tail. Every airplane in Frontier’s fleet (well, those with a Frontier livery) have a unique animal. If you don’t catch the animal on the tail or can’t view the animal on the inside of the winglets, there is a nice big image of the animal when you walk into the door and the flight attendants make sure to announce which plane you are on. I got Mustang Sally on the flight down and Freedom the Bald Eagle on the flight back. I think it is pretty neat for each aircraft to have a different overall livery and I would have to imagine it is even cooler for kids.
The airline was extremely helpful and quick with helping me with my canceled Aspen flight. I wasn’t sitting at the gate for my flight, but kept updating my phone with the flight status. The second I saw it said “canceled” I headed to one of the many customer service desks located around the airport. I imagine this was much better than going to the gate, since no other flights were canceled at the time and there was no line at the customer service desk. The woman confirmed there were no other flights to Aspen from any airline going out that day and started looking for the next day. I asked if I might be able to just fly back to Seattle and she got me on the next flight — which was scheduled to leave in 45minutes for no charge.
Even at 6'1" I had PLENTY of room in Frontier's STRETCH seats which give an extra 5" of room in the first four rows.
With boarding they have an “express boarding” phase. These are for people that have carry-ons that will only be put under the seat in front of them versus taking up overhead space. The concept of this is simple and genius. However, I saw quite a few people lined up that had bags I questioned if they would put under their seat and when checking it out when I boarded, they did not. The idea is great, but I am not sure how well it can be regulated.
Frontier has all economy seats that are leather with fancy headrests and a small TV screen in the seat back. The first four rows give you five more inches of legroom, but the rest of the seats have a decent 31″ seat pitch. Although I was in the back of the (air) bus on the flight down to Denver, I ended up in 3A on the flight back which was a STRECH seat. Although a little extra legroom is nice, even at 6’1″ I don’t think I would be willing to pay anymore for the extra room. I felt super lucky since I could have been trapped in Denver for quite some time, but not only did I get the next flight home and a window seat, but also one with bonus legroom.
Having LiveTV is pretty sweet, but it will set you back money. To watch the TV it will cost you $6 or $8 for a movie. Part of me whats to be like “what the heck?” knowing I can watch TV for free on other airlines like jetBlue and Virgin America and why should I have to pay on Frontier? However, it does cost them more money and on a three hour flight, $6 for entertainment would be greatly worth it. If you are flying Frontier internationally, the TV is free, but movies still cost money.
Before we left the gate at DIA the whole window ended up being blocked with snow. Kind of cool and kind of lame.
On the plus side, you are able to get ear buds for free. It worked out for our flight, since TV ended up being free since the football playoffs were on (although I think it might have had more to do with being over an hour late due to weather).
When watching the TV, I found the controls on the arm rest quite annoying. On more than one occasion I ended up changing the channel with my elbow and I could imagine if you are in the middle seat, it being worse. I kind of wished they had the controls on the seat back, but of course that could make people pushing on your seat back a bit too hard. Not a deal breaker by any means.
On the flight south I was sad since I thought I missed my warm cookie because I was sleeping. However, it turned out they don’t give out the cookies for flights that leave before 10am. Oh yes, I did get my cookie on the way back home and it was delicious.
The only real bad part of the flight was leaving about 1.5hrs late, but I can’t hold that against the airline. It was snowing quite a bit at DIA and it took us awhile to get de-icded. I have to say I was quite impressed with how quickly DIA got planes moving. Of course there were passengers who weren’t so understanding and started to get pissy, but I would much rather wait for de-icing than not and deal with the consequences. It also provided a fun experiment in social media. I had been Tweeting about being in Denver and turned out one of my Twitter followers (@CruiseNerd), was in the plane next to me and sent a photo.
They were both a nice and comfortable flights, but since Frontier doesn’t fly to many locations out of Seattle (Denver, Kansas City and Milwaukee) I don’t get to fly them very often. I end up flying through Denver quite a bit, but Frontier doesn’t end up being the cheapest at the time. I hope I get more opportunities to fly on Frontier in the future.
