Review: Air Canada Economy A319-100 Los Angeles to Montreal
Review: Air Canada Rouge Economy 767-300ER Montreal to Rome
Review: Air France Economy A321-200 Nice to Paris Orly
Trip to Italy, Vatican City, Monaco, and France
Review: Air Canada Economy 767-300 Paris CDG to Montreal
Review: Air Canada Economy A319-100 Montreal to Los Angeles
YOUTUBE: Air Canada: Los Angeles to Montreal
YOUTUBE: Air Canada Rouge: Montreal to Rome
YOUTUBE: Air France: Nice to Paris Orly
YOUTUBE: Air Canada: Paris CDG to Montreal
YOUTUBE: Air Canada: Montreal to Los Angeles
Hello Everyone, and welcome back to the next flight on this marvelous flight. Our flight today runs from beautiful Nice, France to Paris Orly.
Some of you are wondering how the heck I got from landing in Rome to flying out of Nice. Well it goes a little something like this: I arrive in Rome, do all the sightseeing there, then go to deep south Italy including Naples, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Sorrento, Amalfi coast, etc; then we take a train to Florence, spend 4 days there, then go to Pisa, then some Bolognia, then some other coastal Italian cities and then work our way over to Monte Carlo where we spent 2 days and flew out of Nice. Easy. You can see all the lovely details and photos in the next post, but here’s to our flight:
We spent a few nights at the Riviera Marriott Hôtel La Porte de Monaco. It was a beautiful Marriott property, and as expensive as it was, the money was worth every last bit. So we had a very early morning start. Our flight was at 9 AM, but Nice Cote d’Azur Airport is a solid 45-minute drive from our hotel (in good conditions). So we had to wake up super early. Thank goodness we did not take the easyJet flight that we were originally going to because that departed at 7 AM, imagine that morning. Also, we would not have gotten to eat at the hotel. We got complimentary breakfast due to my Marriott status, but the buffet opened at 6:30 AM, which meant that I certainly would not have all the time in the world to eat, but I still got a solid breakfast in:
After a 45 minute drive and Arriving at Nice, we picked up boarding passes and headed straight into security. You had to take an escalator to go up to security, and once done with that, welcome to airside. From the time we arrived at the airport, to the time we were past security, it was super fast: 10 minutes about.
There were a spare 30 minutes before boarding began. One thing I noticed, though strange, was that there were seagulls flying all over the airport. They were on the ground, in the air, etc. Nobody was frightened but rather they just ignored it. I’m not sure if they were used to it, but in all the flying I’ve done, I have never seen birds flying all over the terminal. Soon our plane pulled in from Paris Orly, the airport we were flying to. The glare from the early morning sun made for an overexposed photo.
Soon enough boarding had begun and we were on our way!
Air France
NCE-ORY Airbus A321-200
This was one class configured A321, and rightfully so given the short duration of the flight being a little over an hour. I would imagine this aircraft is only used for travel within France as I’ve seen european Airliners use one class aircraft within the country.
Now onto the interesting part of the flight: I did not have a window seat! So how on earth did I make a video with outside views? Well here is how it goes: This A321 is in a 3-3 configuration with seats ABC-DEF. So A and F seats are the window seats and I was seated in an E seat. So I put one arm on the armrest to my right, and zoomed a little and took all my photos and videos :).
The above photo was taken from the window seat before the passenger who was sitting here boarded. The below once are all from my “lovely” middle seat. But it was Nice Airport, so I had to take photos.
Eventually,
pushback took place and the safety demonstration was given. These planes did not have any in-flight entertainment screen, which was certainly fine by me. Here is another look at Nice airport’s main terminal aka the house of birds.
Despite having to zoom in, the photos still came out nice, so I was happy. The window was dirty too, so I blame that on the plane. Soon after pushback, we had a very short taxi to runway 4R from where we departed. Unfortunately, I was on the right side of the plane, so we did not have the fantastic view of the city you get if you had sat on the left side of the aircraft. Sadly, I cannot tell you to sit on the left or right side to see the city view because the takeoff runway in Nice is always prone to change to the opposite side. But we had a nice view on the turnaround:
Not the best quality, but do keep in mind I was zooming because I did not have the window seat, and also the window was dirty here.
If you are in Nice, do be sure to go to Promenade des Anglais. It’s the main road that runs along the coast and you get some great views of planes taking off from Nice Airport.
Back to the report, after making the 180 turn after takeoff, we turned north towards Paris. Even though I didn’t have the best seat, the views were still lovely!
Shortly after the crew came around with drinks and croissants. I was pleasantly surprised to see that on such a short flight: a croissant and water for this 1-hour flight! Did you hear that Air Canada? I got a free croissant and water on this one hour flight when I could not get any free food items on a 5.5 hour flight to Montreal.
They had a choice between a chocolate croissant and Jam croissant. I wanted the chocolate one of course and surprisingly the crew let us hand pick the croissant from their basket. I had no issue since I don’t care if people have touched the food I eat, but I think the fact that we got to hand pick our croissant may have made others uncomfortable. But after taking a bit
After taking a bite into my croissant, I was sad to realize I had chosen a jam croissant, but it was still very good. It was barely lukewarm. I still enjoyed it nonetheless. By the time the crew collected trash from the snack, it was already time to begin our descent into Paris:
It was a fairly stormy approach and actually, this approach was one of the roughest I’ve had to date no joke!
Many people around me were getting very uncomfortable during final since the plane was tossing and turning a lot, and rightfully so. Having flown many planes, this one definitely felt like a crosswind, but Paris Orly has another set of runways that would have allowed us to bypass the crosswinds so not quite sure why we weren’t using those ones, but oh well. You can see in the youtube video for this flight on my channel how rough the landing was.
After landing, everything was the usual of course, Welcome to Paris, local time, thanks for flying message, etc. However there were some heavies and other aircraft en route to our own gate.
Soon we arrived at our gate:
Overall, this was a great flight. The reason I say that is because despite this being a very short flight, there was still drinks and food. I would have even happy with peanuts or pretzels but Air France gave croissants! Well done! The flight attendants were attentive so that helped make the overall flight enjoyable. Thanks for sticking around, do be sure to check out my next report which has all the lovely trip details. You will love the photos!
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