Long Haul on Swiss Air

I've flown Swiss Air before within continental Europe, but recently I took my first intercontinental flight with Swiss Airlines from San Francisco to Zurich.  It was a fairly standard experience, but learned a few interesting things about Swiss Air and their particular configuration of the A340.

Swiss Air started up the SF/Zurich route only recently, and to inaugurate the route, they had at least one of their planes painted up to resemble... well, to resemble something that you might see if you were really high.  It's a poster child of the counter revolution I suppose, whatever that means.  

 

I unfortunately did not fly on this graffiti in the sky and instead had a more sedated version with  the normal boring Swiss Air paint scheme.  I wonder how Lufthansa (owner of Swiss Air) ever let something like this paint scheme slip in.  The marketing department and the paint police must not have been paying attention when this scheme was proposed.  I wonder if they had any special add ins for this particular plane's in flight service.

Anyway, onto the flight itself.  For those who haven't flown on an A340 before, it has a 2-4-2 seating configuration.  In terms of seating, I was in a middle seat in economy, 26E to be exact.  Part of the reason I sat there was that there were no aisle or windows left.  But I had the foresight to check out the seating arrangement on seatguru.com, and found a few interesting tidbits.  

First, rows 24 through 27 are supposed to have a bit of an extra leg room compared to the seating in the back section.

Second, and more importantly, it was best to avoid A, D, G, K due to the presence of the in flight entertainment box.  This is important because that was  one big box and tremendously limited the amount of leg room available for anyone who wanted to stretch out.  So, if you're tall, or like me just want to be able to stretch your legs.  It's a decent idea to pick some other seats.  

The seat is pretty comfortable.  It had a very nice recline, it did have an older look and feel to it, but for someone who wants to take a nap, it was relatively comfortable.  I'm not saying anywhere near lie flat comfortable, but for economy class, it was certainly passable.

The in-flight system is AVOD (Audio Video On Demand) and is quite on par with some of the Asian airlines, and has all the nice options including a few Asian movies which I found entertaining.   The screen is 8 inch diagonal, which makes watching movies possible.  Nothing exciting for guys who fly Asian or certain European airlines regularly.  But compared to those on United flights or even the Lufthansa 747, this is a huge upgrade.  The one feature they have which would have been exciting if it worked was the nose camera and belly camera which would've shown the world outside.  I couldn't get it to work, what a pity.

The A340 doesn't have individual air flow control, which is a it annoying, but the cabin environment was pretty nice to start with, so not a big deal.

The economy class food was... well economy class, I had the vegetarian pasta.  That was ok, the brownie was a bit too sweet, but I didn't expect a toasted chocolate chip cookie in economy.  The wine was free, an upgrade from United, which no longer offers free alcohol on international flights in economy class.   My initial reaction was what the hell?  But that just goes to show you how much influence O'Leary has had on the airline industry, ancillary revenue... bah.  I suppose I should be happy United isn't charging a Euro a piece for the toilets yet.  One complaint about the orange juice, it was frozen, I mean literally there was a ton of ice in it.  I wish they at least defrosted the stuff.  But the milk chocolate was a nice touch.

Finally, being a mileage junkie, I jumped on the United mileage plus site, and sure enough I had additional Elite Qualifying miles as expected.  The downside however is that for some reason United doesn't like to give the bonus miles with Swiss, which is odd given that Swiss is owned by Lufthansa, and flying on Lufthansa gets you the bonus mileage.  How absolutely disappointing.  But oh well, that's an area of improvement I suppose.

Overall, I would rate the economy class on Swiss a solid B.