Glass jetbridges are always cool, and I'm pretty surprised Istanbul didn't use them in their new airport. Even US airports are finally (though slowly) starting to catch up on this trend!
This first flight was another boring A321, though a somewhat newer one with a somewhat better IFE system this time. This was an absolutely beautiful morning, with the blue sky matching the blue of ITA's cool (if not very Italian) new livery. The second picture shows the new international pier, which somehow looks way more interesting on the outside than it is on the inside, something you don't normally see at airports!
It was absolutely beautiful the entire way across Italy, from the west coast to the east. I'm pretty sure I annoyed the flight attendants by paying more attention to the view out the window than to their meal service! I've never flown eastbound from Italy before, so these views were all new to me, and I was so excited to actually be on the correct side of the plane for those amazing views of Rome.
Things were a lot less nice in Istanbul, and I didn't get any views at all on the way in. There's plenty of cool stuff on the ground there, though, including the Turkish retrojet and an Iran Aseman Airlines A340, both of which were frustratingly parked at gates where you can't see them at all from the terminal.
Istanbul gets airlines from the entire width of Asia, from Turkey itself to Iran to Thailand to China! That's another Iranian A340 taxiing by in the background, this time from Mahan Air.
Time for an Istanbul Airport terminal photo dump:
I really like the curvy structures above the central part of the mall.
The village itself was staffed by employees in costumes, some playing instruments. Not something I've seen in an airport before!
There's a museum upstairs in the terminal, but unlike other airport museums I've visited, this one has an entrance fee. I didn't feel like paying, so I didn't visit it.
This duty free store (nearly identical to the other one, but with a different ceiling design -- in fact, each of the duty free locations seems to have its own ceiling style) has the other Turkish Airlines lounge (which is also apparently pretty much identical to the business class lounge) on its roof.
I was racing all the way from concourse F to concourse A, where I had spotted an Azerbaijan 767 (one of the last passenger 767s ever built) on the way in. Unfortunately, it had started to pour by the time I got over here, but I was still excited to see one of my all-time favorite liveries in person for the first time. (I'm always a fan of blue planes!)
I stood for a while watching the thunderstorm (no wonder it was so bumpy on the way in!) from the windows looking towards the landside terminal. Europe has the cutest tiny buses! Notice the suitcase sitting in the middle of the roundabout -- I watched that fly off a baggage cart, and someone moved it over to the island, but it sat there (in the torrential rain) for quite a while before someone eventually picked it up. Hopefully it made its way back to its intended flight, and hopefully the hard-side suitcase kept whatever was inside from getting completely soaked, but I feel bad for whoever it belongs to!
... and an Air Samarkand A330 (I had never heard of Air Samarkand before this and they don't even have a Wikipedia article), heading off to Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
Istanbul has free "Napzone" areas all over the terminal and paid "Sleeppod" claustrophobic containers in the central area, which are nice amenities for people without lounge access. But yet they don't have unlimited free wifi, unlike every other airport I've been to in many years.
There's also an arcade, filled with all sorts of modern things that I had no idea were still in production.
I'm breaking my no-bathroom-photos rule to show you the bizarre hall-of-mirrors that the bathroom stalls have. Why did anyone think this was a good idea? And how did I manage to take this picture without getting my reflection in frame? (It was quite difficult, I'll tell you that!)
There's a small section of the lounge (over by the desserts, which is the reason I originally ended up over here -- I just wanted some sweet breakfasty food, not the fancy meals they were cooking!) that actually has a view over the airfield, though not a particularly great one. But it did allow me to see the famous SCAT Airlines in person! (I have actually seen their planes in person before, but only pre-delivery at Renton.)
Another couple moderately-exotic planes on the way to my gate (which was pretty close to the lounge this time): Air Arabia and Libyan Wings.
And here are a couple of bad pictures of my plane, Maçka, the first 787 delivered to Turkish and apparently the only one with a name. (Their older widebody fleets mostly have names, but I guess they gave up on that at some point.) I probably could have gotten better pictures, but I was in a bit of a hurry due to getting to the gate well after boarding started and still having to go through the extra special stupid security you always get on flights to the US.
The 787 has the same business class setup as the A350, though I do strongly believe that the 787's overall cabin design is a lot nicer looking. One problem with sitting at the very front, though, is that there are no overhead bins over the first few rows in the center (that's where the crew rest area is, above the passenger cabin), so I actually had some trouble getting my stuff into the overhead bins since this was the only flight I took with a busy business class cabin.
I waited four flights to finally get a shot of the part of the safety video that tells you not to crush your lithium-powered phone in the seats! That's a new warning since the last time I went on a flight. It turns out these fancy business class seats do have places where you can drop things and not be easily able to get them out, as I found out when I dropped a knife during dinner service (embarrassing!).
Hey look, more SCAT Airlines!
And finally some Aeroflot action -- I was wondering where all of Russia's (stolen) planes were, since this is about the only place in Europe they can fly them.
I sure saw a LOT of interesting planes here! (Yes, I know, that pun is terrible.)
... And now I live somewhere down here, just barely visible around the clouds!
And I work somewhere down there, at least one or two days a week.
We followed an Icelandair 757 the whole way in, and they ended up parking right next to my flight.
Behind that temporary wall on the right is the old, abandoned IAF, but that's not where we go any longer -- you still have to go down and back up the now-pointless ramps in the corridor, though.
Instead, you now go up what I'm pretty sure are the longest escalators in the Seattle area on the way to that new bridge I talked about in the first post of this series.
The bridge has one moving walkway (the only one that I know of in the Seattle area outside of concourse A), and would have really nice views out towards Rainier and the Cascades if it wasn't completely cloudy.
Then it's down to a space that's essentially on the roof of concourse A, which has the bathrooms and a weird wood-lined tunnel...
Before you end up in a completely useless empty space that was where passport control was supposed to go, before the feds decided at the last minute that they wanted to put it after baggage claim instead, which has caused a bit of a mess to say the least. I'm an airport construction plan hoarder, and I have an early planset for this project that was posted online at some point, which shows the original intended design here.
The new IAF is actually a really nice space (it has to be the nicest in the US from a purely aesthetic perspective), but I didn't have much time to check it out since, despite being one of the first off the plane and only stopping for a brief restroom break, bags for my flight were already coming off the belt! So much better than in Rome, where even after going through passport control, I had to wait well over half an hour for my bag to show up.
The first bags out were priority bags from people who hadn't transferred at Istanbul (Turkish puts special tags on transfer bags, something I've never seen any other airline do), but it only took a minute or two until mine showed up. I had no wait at passport control (in part because I used the mobile passport control app, but there was hardly any line at the regular lane either) and it was time to go down the long ramp and through the second wood tunnel to the landside area.
And that's it! But while I'll be back to my normal format starting tomorrow, we aren't quite done with Italy yet, because I do have a couple retail sets from this trip, and I'm going to post those next. I hope you all weren't too bored with this diversion over the past week -- I certainly enjoyed it, and sometimes that's what's important anyway.
I don't think ITA's blue livery is all that un-Italian. After all, the Italian national soccer team wears blue uniforms somewhat like the ITA colors! I've heard that ITA might be leaning towards leaving SkyTeam for the Star Alliance. That would be a shame if they get lost in the boringness that is excessive Lufthansa-ness, but I suppose ITA will always be minor players with Air France, KLM, and SAS in SkyTeam. Granted, Star Alliance is pretty busy in Europe as well even with the loss of SAS.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I'd want glass jetbridges in Houston! Those jetbridges tend to be warm even with air conditioning, but a glass one would be quite the oven here during the summer on a sunny day!
I'm sure Burger Jack would be confused for Jack in the Box here in the US! Fortunately, since I have not been to too many airports with modern designs, I have not seen tacky duty free 'malls' like this aside from the small one they force you to go through at YYC after getting through US Customs Pre-Clearance. For whatever reason, I've never really been too interested in retail at airports.
You never know where an interesting sports museum will be. For many years, the unofficial Houston sports museum was located, in all places, at the Finger's Furniture store near downtown. You'd be in the middle of the furniture store when all of a sudden it turned into a sports museum. There is a historical reason for that though because that Finger's Furniture store was located on land which used to house Buff Stadium, the home of the minor league baseball Houston Buffs before Houston got a major league team. They built the museum around where home plate was at Buff Stadium and so that's why the museum was located right in the middle of the store. Unfortunately, Finger's went out of business and the building was demolished a few years ago (it was a neat building with a neat sign so it's sad that is gone https://maps.app.goo.gl/3XL9LBu2xvicRC2n8 ). I think Shipley Donuts (Retail Retell's favorite!) is supposed to build their corporate headquarters on that land, but I don't know if they'll build a sports museum as well and if it'll be open to the public the way the Finger's one was.
I suppose, but blue (especially that very bright blue) isn't nearly as common of a color around Italy as red and green are! Unfortunately, the reason ITA is talking about switching to Star Alliance is that Lufthansa is in the middle of buying ITA, so I'm sure there's plenty of boring to come. (I wish I liked Lufthansa since they fly a lot of cool planes that other airlines don't have, but I just don't.) It's also unfortunate that they're moving to Star since that makes the chance of a direct Seattle-Rome flight even lower (since Seattle's a SkyTeam and Oneworld hub). That being said, even if there was to be a direct flight, I'd probably keep taking flights with connections since they're more interesting!
DeleteThat's cool that that furniture store built a museum! The Lowe's (former Eagle Hardware) on the site of Seattle's original baseball stadium has nothing but a small neglected sign at the back of the building -- the Wikipedia article claims there are some mementos, but I've been there and didn't see anything, so either they're hard to notice or they disappeared sometime after Lowe's took over. It's too bad Finger's Furniture (that's an interesting name) closed down -- hopefully their sports memorabilia ended up in good hands afterwards.