Booking The Trip: Flying The Friendly Skies to India
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Review: United Airlines 777-300ER Polaris Business Class Newark to Mumbai
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Review: United Airlines 787-10 Business Class Newark to San Francisco

YOUTUBE: United Airlines: Los Angeles to Newark
YOUTUBE: United Airlines: Newark to Mumbai
YOUTUBE: United Airlines: Mumbai to Newark
YOUTUBE: United Airlines: Newark to San Francisco

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Here’s the beautiful Boeing 787-10 taking me to San Francisco today. This is actually my first time flying this variant of the 787 so it was definitely flight I was looking forward to.

United flies a few of these per day between Newark and San Francisco/Los Angeles, so I was definitely happy to run into one of these.

Boarding started with Global Services members followed by 1K members, which on this route had plenty of them as usual. Then group 1 was called which is for Business class, United Gold and Platinum, and Star Alliance Gold Members.

EWR-SFO
Boeing 787-10
1/23/20

Business class is the entire forward cabin with 11 rows of business class in a 1-2-1 configuration for a total of 44 seats. It’s a pretty big cabin and this picture isn’t even all of it.

Here’s my seat 7F for the 5-hour flight to San Francisco. This is the first flight in many years that I’m not at a window seat and I was definitely curious how I’d enjoy (or not enjoy) the experience.

The seat cushion was decent, the seat back was a little on the harder side and so was the headrest for this seat.

Waiting at my seat was a Saks Fifth Ave blanket, a nice plush pillow, and an amenity kit with more than enough contents for a 5 hour daytime flight.

I loved the mood lighting that United had in play. It especially blends well with the color scheme of their Polaris seats.

Now let’s have a look into the seat features.

On the right side, there’s a storage that opens and closes and at the start of the flight, a pair of headphones is waiting for you. I pretty much stuffed all my belongings in here for the flight.

Right below that is the remote, universal power port, and USB port.

There’s also a lamp at every seat which is too dim to be useful and so I always think it’s there for style which it does add to the cabin in my opinion.

To my left (or whichever side is away from the aisle) were the seat controls which were fairly intuitive.

By the side of your leg is more storage but mainly for paper items and thinner books.

In front, right below the TV is a kind of storage area for notebooks, phones, laptops, ipads, etc. I think it’s really convenient and really nice. And to the right of that is a USB port.

And this is the foot cubby. It’s fairly narrow if you ask me. If you are looking for a wider footwell, row 1 bulkhead will have more foot space.

Now already at our seat was the menu for our flight:

The crew did come around for pre-departure drinks, though I was conveniently skipped. It happens, it’s an honest mistake and I’m not mad. I also had a lot of water so it was probably good I didn’t load myself with too much water.

The crew also took post-departure drink orders and meal orders. There were 4 crew working business class and all of them were great. 2 of them in particular were just fantastic and really fun people. The guy working my side was very efficient in his work, but was super informal in the way he interacted with all the passengers and I personally prefer that compared to being formal. Being too formal takes away from the personable experience in my opinion.

Anyways, shortly after departure, the crew began service with hot towels that were brought around. I personally prefer my towels cooled, so I always open them and fan them a bit before I use them.

A few minutes later, my table was set for meal service.

Crew brought around nuts and sparkling water. The nuts were actually warm which was great.

And again, it’s the little things with being informal.  When the crew working my aisle laid out my table our interactions went a little something like this:

Crew: *sets my table and tablecloth* “Here you are mi amigo”
Me: “Muchas Gracias”
Crew: “Aye you welcome man.”

Little things like that especially with informal conversation just makes everything more homely.

Now here’s the menu one more time as a reminder of the food on today’s flight:

On these routes, it’s a common habit to collect the menus after taking everyone’ orders, though I hid mine so they couldn’t take it.

Another crew member brought around the appetizer all in one tray. She was also incredibly sweet.

The salad is exactly the same that I had on my Newark to Mumbai flight. It was dry and rubbery just like every other salad leaving out of a US airport. Thankfully the sesame ginger dressing that comes with the salad made it tasty and moist.

Now this was sad. This was prosciutto and gruyere cheese.  I love prosciutto and cheese a lot and could eat them forever, but this is just incredibly lazy. It is not convenient nor practical to eat an entire block of cheese like that. United could’ve chopped that cheese into thinner slices and done the same with the prosciutto as well. It would’ve been much easier to eat. It’s like serving someone an entire pizza without cutting it. It was still sinfully good, but could’ve been made easier to eat.

The garlic bread was warm and soft as I was expecting and enjoy as always.

For main, I tried to avoid the seared beef, but unfortunately 30 other GS/1K members beat me to it and I was left with this.

The beef was cooked fine but it was pretty fatty which made for an unpleasant chewing experience. The greens were drenched in some sort of sweet tangy sauce and while the sauce was nice, there was way too much of it. The polenta actually wasn’t that bad but I’d rather have more garlic bread if I needed more of something.

For dessert, you had the typical sundae cart which is always a treat. There’s choices of a customizable sundae, cheese plate, and snickerdoodles. I went with ice cream with whipped cream, hot fudge, and caramel sauce. It was beyond amazing as always.

I also had two snickerdoodles which were also incredible.

The crew cleaned up quickly and gave water bottles to everyone at the conclusion of the meal.

Service was fast. Everything was done under 90 minutes from departure. This isn’t the fastest service, but if you have flown United transcontinentally, you’ll know they take notoriously long times to do a meal service on these routes.

Another thing, after 5-6 hard resets, the wifi didn’t work on this flight. I didn’t particularly need it on this flight as I got a lot of work done on my previous 16-hour flight from Mumbai and at the United clubs in EWR.  But a lot of other people on the plane were not too happy about it. I appreciate the opportunity to disconnect as always.

I fell asleep for the rest of the flight. The crew did do another round of snacks and wraps at the end of the flight, but I was woken up to the announcements of descent into SFO.

The mood lighting was even set to their pre-arrival sunrise mode.

We touched down a short while after and had a 5-minute taxi to our gate.

Overall, this was another good flight with United. Not having a window seat was…..weird to say the least. But the flight was good, the seats were good as always, the food was alright, but food is always a hit or miss with UA. The crew was great on this sector which is a huge factor for me in how a flight goes as you interact so much with the crew.