Swiss Air Return Flight Addendum

I came back to San Francisco from Zurich recently on Swiss Air, and had several observations about the return flight.

 

For long haul flights that lasts at least 11 hours, three people in the cockpit is the norm for such long haul flights.  This particular A340 seem to have a retrofitted business class that looked very nice.  Unfortunately, for me, I was still stuck in economy, but a couple of additional perks offset the fact that I sat at the bulkhead right behind the business class.  These were the fact that Swiss Air also decided to add in ice cream on the return flight, it was this Movenpick brand vanilla ice cream that I hadn’t heard of before, but I’m not complaining.

Also, the belly and nose cameras were active, although being at the bulkhead, I couldn’t watch us take off or land, although flying over the Atlantic and the continental US meant that there really wasn’t that much to see.  At times like this, a service similar to Channel 9 on United would’ve been nice.  It’s interesting to note that the pilots tended to be trilingual as they gave information in English, German and French.  I can only imagine that the Swiss school system must be pretty good to enable this type of service.

Overall, the Swiss Air service was great, only if they allowed the bonus miles on United's Mileage programs, that would make this a perfect airline to fly on every time, even if it is economy.