Last week I travelled to Beijing with Singapore Airlines as part of a business confrence group. I originally booked this flight so I could get on the A380, but with the service now extended to LHR, they have moved the A380 to the afternoon departure.
0735 Boarded SQ220 9V-SPM B747-412 at Gate 56 and by this time 9V-SKA had been moved to the standoff bay.
0806 Pushack and taxi via Golf, Alpha to the Alpha 1 holding point.
Singapore Airlines do the safety demonstration with a video only, no crew participation.
0825 Rolling Runway 16R with a 40 sec takeoff run.
0920 Breakfast - Fruit, Yoghurt, Omlette, Sausage, Tomato, Hash Brown and Sweet Roll.
Watched "The Bucket List" - Great.
1024 Heading 290 Overhead Cooper Pedy at 10363m with an 83kph headwind.
Watched "I Could Never Be Your Woman" - So So
Watched "Mad Money" - So So
1425 Heading 310 North of Surabaya at 12192m with a 87kph headwind.
Lunch served - Salad, Roll, Fish, ice and vegetables.
1540 Heading 315 at 40000ft and Top Of Descent.
1610 Touchdown Runway 20C and 18C and overcast in Singapore.
Taxi via SC1 and WA to Gate A2 in the new Terminal 3.
1617 Shutdown (1417 local Singapore time).
With a couple of hours to spare I had a look around the new Terminal 3, huge but fairly traditional in design. With Immigaration in the centre of the very long terminal, the A Gates stretch in one direction and the B Gates in the other.
This is the view from the end of the A Gates looking back towards the centre of the terminal and Immigration. As you can see the Terminal is very long, you can walk it, use the escalator or hop on a shuttle train on the right hand side of this image. There is a similar shuttle train setup from the B Gate end of the Terminal and shuttle trains to Terminals 1 and 2.
Immigration is on ground level so you hop off the shuttle train and head down the escalator.
As you can see here, the Terminal is fairly traditional looking. The free internet screens can be seen below the Gate Lounge signs (there are several trough out the Terminal).
There are plenty of free internet screens, food outlets, duty free shops, casual seating and even a few very relaxing lounges to pass the time.
1625 Boarded SQ822 9V-SQF B777-212ER at Gate 11 for Beijing.
The flight time for this sector if 5hr 45min.
1656 Pushback and taxi via WA and WP to the Runway 20R holding point.
1716 Rolling Runway 20R with a 35 sec takeoff roll.
Dinner served - Prawn Salad, Chicken, Rice, Vegetables, Ice Cream and Biscuit.
2259 Touchdown Runway 10 and taxi via T6.
2305 Shutdown
The new terminal at Beijing is simply amazing from an architecture point of view. The inner roof structure is long coloured metal slats in a very gentle multi curved form. There are few supporting pillars and massive spans of open roof area. Late at night it was fairly quite but the Immigration queues were long and very slow (they will need to do something about this for the Olympics).
This is the view looking back to Immigration from the E Gate lounges numbered 12 to 19.
Gate lounge E18
This is the fountain and duty free shopping area just inside immigration.
Looking down the long escalators to the shuttle train station.
Looking back from Gate E20 to the shopping area with its Chinese tea house and rock pool with large fish.
The scale of Beijing was very deceiving, what looked like a quick walk on the map was a taxi ride, definitely the best way to get around (only the subway was cheaper but much busier). The architecture of the new high rise buildings is very creative and different, and the Olympic stadium and Swimming Bubble maintain this theme. At "The Place" in the city centre there is a video screen mounted horizontally facing down, it is the full width of the street wide and 100 to 200 metres long. You can sit outside Starbucks and just watch a movie on the larest video screen you will ever see. Dining is interesting, the menu has just about every thing and creature on the earth, snake, dung beetles, and even included "Bull Pen1s" in one restaurant we visited.
I called home from the Great Wall and climbed to here from the bottom of the valley below, some 1300 steps and 1400ft vertically. The round trip took a couple of hours and was physically very hard on the legs. Beijing is about one and a half hours south down this valley and buried in the incredible bad smog. We were very privileged to have a formal dinner on the wall during the evening and they illuminated the wall as far as you could see in both direction.
Beijing, and China in general, are an amazing destination, so much to see, incredible history, however the smog and weather are the big drawback. We were luck to get a reasonably clear day for the wall visit, but Friday was just a terrible smog.
The trip home was via Singapore again, SQ821 9V-SQM B777-212ER from Beijing to Singapore, and 9V-SPO B747-4012 from Singapore to Sydney.