12 Days in Europe - Getting There

nw747 dtw ams flight deck 150x112 12 Days in Europe Getting ThereThat took a while! I did not pack until the last moment, so I only had a couple hours of sleep the night before. My flight was not leaving until after 10, but I could only get a ride to the airport before 8 so I spent a couple of hours there and then I had another five hour wait at Detroit. My flight to Amsterdam was on a Northwest 747 and I was hoping it would be the newly painted bird in Delta colors (see the youtube video of the paint procees). I did see it at a gate, unfortunately it was going to Tokyo. To add insult to injury, it actually just came back from Amsterdam! Oh well, I went to the gate area and tried to catch some naps. An hour before boarding, I got up and walked around from one end of Concourse A to the other end and back so get some exercise before the eight hour flight.

Once we boarded the plane, the captain came on and told us he had good and bad news. Oh-oh… The good news was that we would have a strong tailwind getting there sooner. The bad news was that Schiphol had a curfew so we could not get in early. We ended up sitting on the ground in Detroit for about an hour before pushing back. This was my first time on a 747 and the take-off roll seemed to take forever, followed by a very shallow (what it seemed) climb out. Thankfully, I was able to get a seat by the exit door so it was pretty comfortable less the galley right next to me. I had some wine with my dinner and soon dozed off for a little bit.

The approach to Amsterdam was pretty cool, flying over a wind power generator farm off the coast and then all the fields and canals. Normally on smaller airplanes you can feel the configuration changes when they lower the flaps or dump the landing gear. Not so on this bird - everything was so smooth and unnoticable up until the touchdown and roll out. When we were deplaning, I went upstairs to get a picture with the flight deck for my first 747 flight. The crew was very nice and was telling me how these are “small hops” for them (normally 747 go to Asia).

I had a two hour layover in Amsterdam, and it took me almost all that time to make it through the customs, get the ticket for my next flight, and make my way around the airport. My first impression of Schiphol was that it was kind of confusing, but I made it where I needed to be and boarded the Air France flight to Paris. It was an A321 in their international configuration (with middle seat seatbacks folded down to create a sort of a table in the first dozen of rows or so… weird). There were probably 50 people at most and I got a full row all to myself. We were served breakfast made of a couple of croissants and tea (no OJ!). The flight was uneventfull and I just could not stop thinking how can they afford to have five or six flight attendants on board, in addition to having two people at each gate in Amsterdam, even if it was a long time before the flight. Here in US you are luck if you can find the gate agent half an hour before boarding…

The rest of my 12 Days in Europe posts:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 1:22 amand is filed under Amsterdam Schiphol, Detroit Wayne County, Paris Charles de Gaulle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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