First real flight post-apocalypses. We have a friend (or two, Hi Lindsey) who goes to the University of Minnesota and lives in (who would have guessed) Minneapolis. Over Memorial Weekend, we went to see him and hang out for a while. Unfortunately for him, this blog is about flying penguins (or emus, I always confuse flightless birds in the air), so we’ll start with the first (not quite) post-pandemic Delta experience.
Using some extra points and a little bit of money we booked 2 tickets on
DL 3853 Nashville (BNA) to Minneapolis St. Paul (MSP) in Delta First
DL 3706 Minneapolis St. Paul (MSP) to Nashville (BNA) in Delta First
We decided to go out Saturday morning and come back Monday afternoon. Considering we still have to drive about 2 hours home from BNA it worked out pretty well. I will start by describing the outbound but I promise the return was almost exactly the same so I’ll skip the boring stuff.
The Airport
Usually I don’t like to spend time talking about the airport but there are two things that caught my attention at Nashville.
Tennessee has not the best track record when it comes to mask-wearing (or other “liberal” stuff) but once you were in the airport almost everyone was wearing one. Of course this is mostly due to the Federal Mask Mandate that requires masks in airports and airplanes, but Nashville being in TN, I expected there to be more issues.
The second thing I noticed: whoever designed the recent “upgrades” to the airport has been drinking too much whiskey – either that or they hired the same person that designed the Texas Power Grid…
In order to get to the economy lot, you have to first drive past the Terminal. It seems counter intuitive and not well thought through, considering that all the cars that just want to drop someone off also drive past the (you guessed it) Terminal. Once you finally make it back to the Terminal via the bus (that works surprisingly well) you will have a really hard time finding a bathroom. Brand new signs indicate Security, Check-In, Parking Lots and everything you would ever need…. except a bathroom. To find one of these mythical places you have to go into the closet, turn right when you meet the lion, hike up the golden brick road about 2 miles and fall down into a hole full of kangaroos.
The Plane
Both flights were operated by a CRJ 900. For those not familiar with big birds (planes! Not penguins for once) this is a small one.
Delta has 12 First Class seats on this thing (64 Economy seats, of which 20 are considered Comfort Plus or Extra Legroom). Unlike some of the other Airlines (looking at you United and your CRJ-200) this plane does have a bathroom in the front of the aircraft and one in the back.
We choose seats 1C and 1D on the outbound and 4C and 4D on the return. I like these seats a little more than United’s First class seats on the puddle jumpers (note that technically United has no CRJ 900 but they have other emus of comparable size). They feel a little bit wider, although looking it up online they are apparently narrower? Not sure what’s going on there. Other than that, they are pretty standard domestic First class seats, not much to differentiate the airlines here (Europe is a totally different story but we’ll get to that in a future post).
The Flight
The flight was supposed to take off at 11:50am, so knowing BNA is usually pretty relaxed we tried to get there a little before 11am. As usual we got there early so we decided to park the car in the Economy lot that’s farthest away – because I am the kind of person that would rather sit on the bus than stand in line anywhere. Then we had the whole find-a-bathroom issue mentioned above.
Unfortunately the incoming flight (from Minneapolis) was delayed so we had to wait for our plane and ended up being 40 minutes delayed. DL was alright with respect to keeping us informed. They could have done worse but they could also have been a little more proactive, considering the plane was running late since 7am that day (yes I am aware that is not how it always works but in this case the plane never changed and was assigned to that route since the day before so they should have known).
Once the plane pulled up we decided to board last. Usually I like to board early but since COVID I have started boarding last to avoid all the people walking past me. Luckily, DL is pretty good about keeping overhead space for First Class passengers.
We ended up taxing pretty quickly and took off in no time. They were trying to make up some of the delay and ended up landing at MSP at 14:24 only 29 minutes late.
Service is still not what it used to be in 2019. But Ben, the Flight Attendant, did the best he could with limited support from Delta. He did ask every one of the 12 passengers what they wanted to drink and addressed them (including us) by name. They even had coffee available, which is already an improvement over earlier this year, but Economy still has no coffee or tea available (I believe that has changed since). I did get my usual 45 cups of coffee (ok maybe I had only 3). He also came around with a tray of Biscoff cookie or pretzels (sorry DL but Anna and I agree Stroopwaffles are better).
Landing was pretty uneventful and we ended up in Minneapolis without any further issues.
The only big difference on the return was that we sat at the gate a little longer than expected. Turned out there were a bunch of thunderstorms so they had to hold us for a while. Perfect opportunity to catch the tail feathers of some of these Delta birds.
