October 30, 2007
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Monday, October 29
We got up and got packed to go. Sigh. I
love Hawaii and as much as I love San Francisco, I wouldn’t mind living
in Honolulu one little bit. We walked around for a few minutes before
we left for the airport.
Two happy faces from Mr. Poe. The second is his “Poodle face”. Yes,
he picked up his toothiest grin from my dear, departed Poodle Ashley.
On him, it was known as his “bacon face”.
Here we are at the entrance of the Royal Hawaiian waiting for the van to take us to the airport:
Honolulu
Airport is really, really cool. There’s tons of different airlines,
lots of cool heavies, and the airport itself is really beautiful.
Well, maybe not the check in counter.
When we got through security the first thing I saw was this Korean 777-200. I love KAL livery. Very pretty.
Honolulu
has terrible food choices and the Chinese food I ate should have come
with a written apology. “Dear Customer. We’re sorry our food sucks so
hard. But we realize it’s either us or Burger King so why should we
bother? Try to enjoy your shitty, shitty meal. Maybe some hot mustard
will help disguise the taste.”A Delta 767(400?) with an Omni
International DC-10 behind it and a Japan Airlines 747 behind that.
The Omni DC-10 was probably a troop charter and I couldn’t get a good
shot of it
Hawaiian 767-300′s. Hawaiian has a beautiful livery and one of my favorite:
Japan Airlines 747′s. I don’t think this is a -400′s because it
doesn’t have winglets. JAL has 7 -300′s and I think this is one of
those:
JAL 747-400
United 777-200A
There’s a beautiful, large garden at HNL between two of the terminals that you can go into!
United 777-200A’s
Northwest Airlines A330′s. NWA has both -300′s and -200′s in their fleet. I think this one might be a -300
I think this is a -200
American
Airlines 757-200′s. They’ve got winglets! Which is pretty recent. I
thought AA sent larger aircraft into HNL and I’m wondering if this is
because it’s the off season or whether it’s because AA is trying to
improve the numbers on the notoriously low yielding Hawaiian traffic:
An ATA 737-800
A fedex MD-11. My favorite aircraft! Not too many of them in passenger use anymore. Sigh.
I made my way over to my gate which is in the old terminal which is
really, really neat. It’s was build in the 1962. You can real a
little more about it here.
It hasn’t been redone as much as the old Pan Am Worldport at JFK and it
really takes you back to a time when aviation was elegant, thrilling,
and fun. Here is the terminal viewed from one of the breezeways
leading to it:
This is the old entrance which is currently inside the secure area and accessible only by bus:
This
is the inside of the terminal. It almost looks like a vintage
photograph. The waiting area has a large mezzanine above it. The
terminal is sleek, stylish, and airy:
This
is the mezzanine area. Mr. Poe tells me that the first class
passengers used to board from up here. Right now there isn’t much up
there at all except for the Red Carpet Club:
These cool light fixtures are a little dated but they’re still fabulous. They need to be cleaned.
Our ride for the day:
Same aircraft viewed from the mezzanine. I can’t see how they boarded a 707 from up here but Mr. Poe says they did:
10-29-07 United Flight 74 HNL-SFO Dep 2:10 PM Arr 9:05 PM 777-200 N213UA
I
was seated in Premium Economy which was a nice surprise. There’s a lot
more leg room which was nice because I’m tall. United’s buy on board
seems to be pretty popular but other than that, little has changed in
the last 10 years on United. They still use the enormous televisions
in the aisles instead of drop down screens. This I find really
puzzling because there’s a lot of those TV’s on a 777 and it would seem
that the changeover to drop down flat screens would pay for themselves
pretty quickly because they weigh so much less. Even the safety video
seemed mired in the last century with the female flight attendants in
really 90′s looking seriously matte with matte brick red lips that made
me wonder if I’d seen them as on Friends playing somebody’s high
powered bitch of a boss. It looked dated much in the same way that the
terminal did. If I compare United today with Delta, who I flew in
August to Orlando, modern thinking Delta seems to be trying a million
little ideas to improve the passenger experience while United hasn’t
really changed much at all and looks old, tired, and broke. The plane
was, however, very clean and they gave us full cans of soda. Twice.
Here we are in flight:
We landed into SFO. Terminal 3 has a had a lot of renovation and has a
lot better food choices than it did a couple of years ago. But it
definitely isn’t as cool looking as the Honolulu airport:
We
got on BART and picked up the truck and went home to the dogs who were
unbelievably happy to see us. Rufus cried all night long. Around 1AM
I figured out that he was afraid of the forced air heat blowing air
through the vents. We haven’t used it since we’ve had him and it
causes a lot of dog concern.
