Traveling to Cairo, 2011 - Part Two

Our flight from NYC's Kennedy airport left promptly at the scheduled 10:20 p.m. Delta loads by "zones" but allows the front zones on first, then higher and higher seat numbers. That is just the opposite of what used to work well on NWA, loading the rear seats first. Naturally, chaos results as the front row passengers block the aisles while back row passengers try to push through.

The flight attendants helpfully yell out "please sit down and allow other passengers to move past," and suggest just putting one bag in the overhead bin and waiting until later to try to add other items. Yeah, real likely!

One flight attendant repeatedly told an Egyptian gentleman to be seated and let others pass. He told her he would not! Ah, we knew we were well on our way to Cairo. I think he objected as much to being told what to do by a woman as anything. Later in the flight, parents were repeatedly taken to task for letting children run up and down the aisles during meal service. As we barely pulled off the runway and began taxiing on the ground in Cairo, a passenger stood up and started unloading an overhead bin. O, the chaos!

Delta has taken pains to provide good service for Egyptians on the New York - Cairo run. The maps and flight information is provided in both Arabic and English.


A running total distance and direction is also conveniently provided for Mecca:


We were in the air and things were reasonably settled down after an hour so dinner service began. That meant that dinner was actually a midnight snack as Linda's watch shows here:


I had the beef and it was a tasty dish with a good deal more "spicy" in it than I expect from airline food.

Our route brought us over Europe via France. The in-route navigation display quit working shortly after this point so I don't know exactly where we crossed the Mediterranean.


As we approached the northern coast of Africa, interesting cloud formation began to appear. They reminded me a bit of the rock formations in the Egyptian White Desert that we saw last year.



Cairo is a rather monochromatic city. It might even be described as sand-colored buildings set in the sand. Most of suburban Cairo is new-construction high-rise apartments and these examples near the airport are typical.