Luxury Ride Home

    

     Much of this trip was stitched together by taking advantage of seasonal and geographical flight bargains using credit card and airline points and miles. For instance, it cost fewer points to fly the 10 hour flight from Las Vegas to London this January, than it frequently does to fly the two hours from Chicago to Boston. The vagabond nature of this trip was due in part to the quirks of where and when those bargains were to be found.

    Leaving Calcutta Sunday night, the 29th, I was starting on the last phase of the trip, one where I splurged a bit in the throwing about of my accumulated points. I had started the planning of this trip several months ago by booking one of the last flights first: Singapore to New York on Singapore Airlines. This is generally considered to be the longest flight in the world at the moment, clocking in at 18 to 19 hours, depending on the breeze. Splurge Number One was to use a portion of my stash of  points to book a seat in Business Class on this flight. 19 hours in the air kind of cries out for it, and, once again, (in relative terms) the number of points for Business Class wasn't too bad.

    One of the last of the 11 flights on this trip that I had booked in the planning stage was Calcutta to Singapore. There weren't many good options that fit with my schedule, and I wasted lots of time trying to figure something out. I eventually landed on flying Emirates WESTWARD to Dubai, and then connecting there to a flight back east and south to Singapore. This cost fewer points than some of the more direct options. Then, after seeing that the Dubai-Singapore flight was on an Airbus A380 double-decker jumbo, I made reckless Splurge Number Two: I emptied my piggybank of points and upgraded the Emirates flights to First Class. I would experience it at least once, my egalitarian sensibilities be damned.

    At midday, I checked out of my hotel--the Oberoi Grand Kolkata (which likewise cost less than I've paid for a Comfort Inn in Toledo). I asked a gentlemen in the lobby named Aaron, the bell hop, if he could arrange a cab to the airport for that evening. He asked when my flight was, and I told him 8:20.  Without hesitating, he said, "Ah...you're flying Emirates to Dubai. Very good." I told him I was impressed that he knew the flight schedules so well, and he said, "Yes...Boeing 777 with Rolls Royce Trent 800 engines. Nice plane." (I replied that I was partial to GE engines). 

    Here's Aaron the bell hop:

    
    He went on to toss out many other facts and statistics about this and related flights, and I think he knew the gross weight, typical travel time, and the landing airspeed of the 777 to Dubai. He said that he had wanted to be a pilot when he was younger. I thought that I should get used to flinging around my upcoming (and brief) status as a privileged, sophisticated first class flyer, so I mentioned my exalted rank to Aaron. After going on excitedly about all the delights that I'll experience, f.c. on Emirates, he said, "wait a moment, please," took out his cell phone, and dialed up his friend Lisa at the Kolkata airport, who apparently worked for Emirates. She wasn't working that day, so he instructed me to ask for a Mr. Mainak at the check-in desk, I think suggesting that--as a stranger who chatted with Aaron, who knows Lisa, who works for Mr. Mainak at Emirates-- I would get red carpet treatment. The magic of "first class" status at work...

    I never connected with Mr. Mainak at the airport, so never got my VIP treatment, but it didn't matter. I strode out through the hotel lobby and out into the dusty, littered Maidan park across the street, with my tattered day pack and my quick-drying, self-washed clothes, feeling very much the pampered Big Shot.

    I got to the airport that evening with plenty of time. Here's the wide open lane for my big first First Class check-in, sans red carpet. Sorry for not obscuring the economy plebeian rabble in the background; I averted my eyes when in my lane, as you can understand:

    There was a little delay over my visa and other documentation (I debated whether to try a, "Do you know who I AM?!, or maybe more usefully, "Where the hell is Mainak?!," but thought better of it), then I checked in (no bags to check; all that I had was slung over my shoulders), and made a beeline for the complimentary First Class lounge: 

    Failing to spot Bono or Taylor Swift, or anyone to talk to, I moseyed over to the buffet and dished up some free chicken masala and stuffed a few souvenir salt packets into my pack. As I sat later in my comfy leather chair, I did get to overhear some snatches of the lounge chat I craved: two suited Brits talking about having to, "renegotiate the whole UAE contract." Rarified first class lounge time must pass more quickly than street-level time, because, before I knew it, I needed to make my way to the gate.

    Here's the only reasonable view I could get, before boarding, of our mighty 777, the largest twin-engine jet in the world (and this one, according to the Emirates web site, DID have GE 90 engines powering it, not Rolls Royce Trents):

    Flashing my first class ticket, I breezed down the first class jetway directly to the first class section of the plane, and slid into my first class cubicle, with its big screen tv, bowl of snacks, sexy desk lamp, and handy makeup mirror:

    And then I explored what some of the buttons did :

    I squandered my opportunity to drink like James Bond on this flight, too busy cycling all the motorized accessories in my little luxury cocoon:

    ...but I ate all the free bread in my dinner bread basket:

    ...then relaxed under the artificial starlight, hoping the Dom Perignon was safe from the clamorous hordes back in steerage:

    It was a short (five and a half hour), uneventful flight and, bored with making the minibar go up and down, I binge-watched "Chernobyl" and got glimpses of the lights of central India gliding by beneath us. We landed in Dubai about 1am. Exiting the plane, and coming to the end of the jetway, I encountered a red-capped young Emirates employee waiting with a couple from first class and displaying a tablet screen with "PAUL TITCOMB" written indiscreetly in large letters. Apparently, first class passengers aren't expected to find their own way through the airport, so she was there to shepherd us down the corridors:

    ...keep a respectful distance as we rode on the first class transfer bus:

    ...and ease our passage through security:

    Because I was arriving in the middle of the night, and had a 9 hour layover, Emirates had arranged for a complementary hotel stay for me. I tagged along with the couple (from St. John, New Brunswick, returning from a wedding in India) to the First Class Lounge, where they were going to be deposited until their connecting flight in a couple of hours. My Emirates shepherdess would then take me to the "chauffeur" for the ride to the hotel.

    When we got to the lounge, I told my guide that maybe I could skip the hotel and just sleep here if they had some place for me to lie down. She said she would be happy to take me in and show me.

    O.  M.  G. 

    The Emirates Dubai First Class Lounge is the largest airport lounge in the world, at over 100,000 square feet. It occupies most of one floor of an entire terminal. Once you pass these doors, you enter a parallel universe. Very few people come back out through these doors: everything you need is provided within, and when the time comes, you go directly from the lounge down your first class chute to the plane. No distressing mingling with the grubby proletarians! They have their (lower) floor; we have ours. 

    The lounge has its own duty-free shops, a spa, a full-service restaurant, bar, showers, business rooms, and on and on and on. At 2am, I'm pretty sure I could have gotten a massage, some aromatherapy, a light snack and a nightcap in the bar. But the biggest impression was one of sprawl:

    Anyway, the only amenity that I wanted to use was the shower. Here's the woman who lead me to my shower room:

    A poor picture of the shower room:

    After the shower, I found a quiet room with some pieces of furniture that appeared to function as beds, and, with the supplied blanket, slept surprisingly well for about 6 hours.

    In the morning, (after a second shower!) once again I squandered an opportunity to feast on Emirate's dime, and had just coffee and a croissant:

    Anyway, when my time came I went through the private exit gate from the mega-lounge and down to meet my ride to Singapore. This is an identical A380 to mine:

    And here are the big engines on my plane, each one capable of about 35 tons of thrust:

    The A380 is a beast: weighing as much as 630 tons at takeoff, and--for the longest distance flights--carrying over 80,000 gallons of fuel. I guess I shouldn't be any more impressed about 600 tons of aluminum taking flight, than the not-insubstantial 90 tons of a 737. I mean, I'm probably not the only one, in struggling to put these aeronautical feats into a human context, who waves his hand back and forth in the air and senses the measly few grams of resistance I can generate. The only thing this exercise ever teaches me is that in the realm of modern aviation, there are speeds, and thrusts, and Bernoulli forces, and airframe stresses, and rates of combustion that surpasseth my comprehension, all neatly worked out and hidden within the haunched wings and engine cowlings by the geniuses in Seattle and Toulouse. I mean, it takes 275,000 horsepower to get this A380, with me and a few unopened bottles of Dom Perignon, into the air. How does the brain process that??

    The senses aren't much help (inside the plane, anyway): here's all 275,000 horses quietly at work putting the 600 tons in the air:

    There's not much to say about this flight. As a recent initiate to first class flying, I now knew how to correctly deploy my cutlery when the tablecloth was set, and I could operate the minibar with my eyes shut.

    The big thrill was the inflight shower. I had made my appointment before we took off for a shower at about 4 hours into the flight. At my allotted time, Nicoleta, my flight attendant, came to my cubicle and said those exhilerating words: "are you ready for your shower now?" She led me up to the front, past the grand staircase:

    ...and accompanied me into the shower bathroom to give me my instructions. Which pretty much amounted to 1) you get half an hour in the bathroom, and 2) 5 minutes of shower water.

    So, I took my 3rd shower of the last 12 hours at 40,000 feet over southern India. And I used only half of my shower budget:

And here's the stroll back to my cubicle:

    I landed in Singapore about 9pm local time and took a cab to my hotel in the city.

Since I had to head back in the morning to get my long flight home, the cab rides to and from the hotel were my chief experience of Singapore, sadly.

    Finally, it's Tuesday January 31, my last day of the trip. I got to the airport in plenty of time for my flight to New York, but apparently not enough time to get to the part of the airport with the waterfall from the roof that I really wanted to see. It is a dazzling but surprisingly calming airport, at least the terminal that I saw. It's also unusual (in my experience) in that the TSA-style security screening takes place at each gate. This makes the majority of the airport open for strolling, and also eliminates long lines. It's a great system.

    I did have time to visit a large butterfly garden at the terminal:

    And finally, here she is: the Airbus A350-900ULR (ULR for Ultra Long Range). 

    In a plane that can carry up to 350 passengers in a normal configuration, the Singapore Airlines 900ULR is configured (for some combination of economics, demand, and long distance ability) for 161 passengers. Just about half of those seats are business class. So the roughly 12 fewer tons of passengers this plane carries can go to carrying the extra fuel needed to make the roughly 19 hour trip.

    For all my anticipation of the flight, there isn't much to say about the 18+ hours spent on it. The seats are cleverly designed to allow you to lay down on a slight diagonal with your feet in a little tunnel that sticks into your neighbor's property ahead, but it's just below where their elbow would be. I didn't miss a single one of the shiny frills from Emirate's first class, and I actually (for the first time in my life) slept soundly on a plane. Which is the main story of my experience on the world's longest flight.

    Actually, my biggest excitement came from seeing the flight path on the monitor when I got my seat. It showed a polar route! As near as I could tell, very close to going over the north pole and coming down to New York over Greenland and Labrador. Sadly, this was apparently some computer glitch, showing the SHORTEST route, but not the one we were to take. You can see the line on the screen shooting straight up over Russia, which I guess is one of the reasons it is not a current route.

    Here is the route our plane took:

    And that's pretty much it. After a short hop from JFK to Boston, Helen picked me up at the airport and brought me back to my car. 

    After 12 days and 30,727 miles by air, 1125 miles by rail, 67 miles by foot, and about 10 miles by tuk-tuk, I had satisfied a good deal of wanderlust and came back both tired and refreshed.

    It was a great trip, and I would happily do any part of it again.