There’s a flight attendant
Patrick Coyle flies from Honolulu to Nadi aboard Fiji Airways
who works for Air New Zealand called Lisa, and she’s a dead-ringer for Courteney Cox.
Plane: B737-800 series which is a bit of a surprise as it’s a pretty long haul (approximately 5000km) for a single aisle medium-size, twin jet. In fact, this flight is one of the longest non-stop scheduled passenger flights in the world for this type of aircraft. This is the only direct flight between Hawaii and Fiji and operates only once a week. It leaves Sunday morning, arriving on Monday morning. Class: Economy. Seat: Considering the size of the aircraft and the length of the flight I was a bit concerned about space but was pleasantly surprised about leg room. Seems to be a bit more than usual.
Flight time: 6 hours 25 minutes. Service: Considering the departure time out of Honolulu (see Airport Experience below), it was fine. Pretty much as soon as the landing gear was stowed the lights went out in the cabin and we all went to sleep. There was no one walking through the cabin overnight offering water. If they are going to let us sleep straight away perhaps they should consider having a bottle of water available at each seat when you board. Otherwise the service was friendly and attentive.
How full: It wasn’t. Only about 60 passengers out of a possible 160 so plenty of opportunity to spread out and find a row to yourself to sleep. There are eight Business Class seats and they had only a couple of empty seats.
Fellow passengers: Vast majority seem to be Fijian workers travelling home and a few holiday-makers like us. Also a few travellers from the US mainland en route to New Zealand and Oz via Fiji.
Food and drink: Once we all woke up with about two hours to go to Nadi we had breakfast. The usual airline breakfast fare. Nothing spectacular, but it filled the gap since it was many hours since dinner in Honolulu the night before.
Toilets: Small but kept nicely clean. With so few people on board there were no real queues.
Airport experience: Departure time out of Honolulu is 2.50am on a Sunday morning. Being an international flight out of the US you are encouraged to be at the airport about three hours beforehand so everyone was there at midnight. At this time of night, this flight is the only one out of Honolulu for a couple of hours either side of our departure so the airport was deserted. Checkin didn’t open till 12.30am so we all had to sit on our bags outside on the curb. Once check-in opened the fun started. There were two main issues that resulted in it taking more than an hour to get checked in. A) We were booked on an Air New Zealand flight out of Nadi to Auckland. Because we were not ticketed on Fiji Airways out of Fiji we had to provide ticket proof at check in at Honolulu of our flight out of Fiji. Only having my booking on my Air New Zealand app on my phone was not sufficient. I had to produce “a paper copy of my itinerary” out of Fiji. At 1am at a deserted Honolulu airport, that was a problem. Eventually the “local US” check-in manager for Fiji Airways relented and allowed us to email through, to her private email address no less, our Air New Zealand flight details out of Nadi. So, a word to the wise, if you are operating on different carriers make sure you print out and have at hand details of all your flights when leaving the US. B) Because of the size of the aircraft, baggage weight was fanatically enforced at check in. I read on the Fiji Airways website that flights out of the US went on number of pieces and not weight. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the very fine print at the bottom of the page that Honolulu was an exception to the rule. Being allowed only 23kg meant we had to open our bag at the counter and shift stuff into carry on (which was also strictly enforced at 7kg each).
Once through this ordeal it was very straightforward and quick through immigration and TSA screening. We walked past all the closed shops to our (air-conditioned) gate lounge which we weren’t allowed into as it hadn’t been “security swept yet”. So yet again, we all had to sit out in the outdoor concourse until they opened the lounge about 30 minutes before out departure.
Arrival at Nadi was a great experience. They are doing up the terminal building and it shows. It all looks shiny and clean with the usual wonderful Fijian warmth from everyone.
STOP PRESS: On arrival at Nadi, we bumped into a crew member from the flight. He told us that although the fuel tanks were right to the brim, the plane was still plenty (20 tonnes) under maximum weight due to virtually no freight and so few “self-loading freight” (aka, passengers). When I mentioned the battle of the checkin bags we had in Honolulu he sympathised and said that there is almost never a full load of passengers and baggage weight would never be a big issue, but the rules were the rules.