Anyway back to the flight. Travelled out to the airport with some people from the conference I knew. One was flying up to LAX with me, and then back to Germany – he had originally been on the earlier flight but his travel agent had rebooked him onto my flight.....or so he thought! Despite an e-mail from them, when he tried to check-in he was told that he had missed his flight as the agent hadn’t actually made the changes. He was waitlisted for the flight and had a nervous wait to find out if there were seats available – he was lucky and managed to get one of the few that became available. This time, I didn’t go direct as the flight left around 5am, so it was via LAX for me. The first flight was on an Embraer EMB-120 plane. Basically it has 10 rows, with a total of 29 seats. I had one of the window single seats in the exit row. The plane wasn’t full, since for “weight balance” they have to leave some of the seats free – slightly bizarre. There is one cabin crew and definitely very little luggage space on board. To get on the plane, rather than steps there is a long but gradual ramp up. We taxied to the runway, and then sat for ages before we started up and trundled down the runway. I realised after a little while that a lot of people had earplugs in – it is very noisy on board, but it felt like real flying. Large windows and low flying meant great views over the desert until we go to LAX where it was cloudy and raining! No in-flight service and the seat belt stayed on the whole time.
Loved the flight – very different to being on a wide-body aircraft with all the fancy stuff and service on board, and great to get back to what flying used to be like!
