Review of SAS flight from Copenhagen to Paris in Economy

This FR begins after deplaning coming from OSL:
CDG-OSL : SK834 14:05 – 16:20 here
OSL – CPH : SK361 18:00 – 19:10 cancelled, replaced by SK1465 17:15 - 18:25 there
CPH – CDG SK1563 19:40 – 21:40 you are here
And since SAS forced me to take the previous flight, I have all my time in CPH. Some plane spotting :
Icelandair 757

A venerable Danish Air Transport ATR72, which began her career on 03 July, 1989.

An SAS CRJ 900

Another unknown model, parked on my side of the window operating me from the CRJ

CPH is less plan spotter friendly than OSL because the lighting of the tarmac is less powerful and less white, but it is decent for that purpose.

FIDS

The flight to Paris was displayed

But it was much too early for boarding : there was nearly nobody at the gate..

The Scandinavian countries are not part of the Euro zone (unlike Finland which is Nordic, but not Scandinavian).

Kastrup is a city whose shopping mall has its own airport, also used by the inhabitants of Copenhagen.

A statue made out of Denmark’s most famous exports

Lego (or rather Duplo) building blocks, of course!

A shop that some Flight Reporters fantasize about, in the background (insider joke)

On the other hand, salmon is not local and the prices there meant that completing my shopping was not an option. An information poster on what is forbidden in the airport on the way to my gate.

… but also on the rights of the passengers in case of delay or cancellation of their flight.

James Bond never used this vehicle, to the best of my knowledge

The boarding room had filled meanwhile. Rather than being squeezed in the crowd, I settled at the empty gate on the other side of the corridor, but it had not been cleaned.

Another demerit to CPH : there were nearly no power port for passengers. There was only one in that room, far from any seat and already used by a passenger. You should always travel with a multi-socket adapter, but the autonomy of my laptop allowed me to prove that there was free wifi coverage and to continue working in the plane.

Boarding started. Was it the suspension of the Schengen free travel rules, or a standard procedure in CPH ? the staff checked the IDs of the passengers.

Another notice on the rights and obligations of the passengers, at the counter

A glimpse of the aircraft

No welcoming smile when boarding… for the simple reason that the FA which should have been there had gone down the aisle to manage a minor problem (of hand luggage ?) in the first rows. She was coming back, and was smiling when I took this picture.

The flight was not full: there would be nobody at the middle seat. The seats were just as uncomfortable as in the 738s.

The seats in this Airbus have a magazine pocket in the lower part of the seat’s back

… this reduces the available space : 26 cm, vs. 30 cm in the 738 of the preceding flight.

Another handicap was that there was a seat support slightly shifter to the outside, which reduced the space for the window seat passenger. The result was that my laptop case did not fit like it did in the 738, and left no space for the feet. I could place it on the side since I had no neighbor, but had there been more passengers, it would have been a nuisance.

The in-flight magazine could be leafed through pleasantly, but meets the rules of this kind of media.

Mentioning the inclusion of its wines in the Unesco World Intangible Cultural Heritage List is very classy, but on the other hand, there was not a single word on the fact that the beaches of Lampedusa do not attract vacationers only.

Safety demonstration on the IFE screens.

Despite their industry name, there won’t be any entertainment : they all folded back after the end of the safety demonstration.

Well, nearly all of them !

Some aircraft seen after pushback. The pictures are not very sharp, due to the lack of light :
Austrian Fokker-100

Austrian A320

Finnair A320

Imminent take-off from Runway 04R

… there it was :

My camera was not sensitive enough to obtain a decent picture of CPH

The cloud ceiling was reached soon

The safety card

This was the entire dinner offered by SAS, on the table tray next to me.

Descent towards CDG flying west (not usual, because the prevailing winds are westerlies). This gave me a view of the rotating projector of the Eiffel Tower (there are actually four synchronized projectors which are lit on and off successively, on each side of the last floor of the tower).

Aéroports de Paris (the CDG operator) had changed the lighting of Terminal 1, further to the terrorist attacks in Paris a week before

It was simple and efficient : some regularly spaced lights had been switched off, and blue and red filters had been added (because of that, the white light was more powerful in comparison)

The French flag is a three color flag like many others in the world, which fails to give it an immediately recognizable identity like for instance those of the US, the UK or Japan. But this very ordinary design becomes an advantage there, and I liked this display.
[Note for this English version of this report: like the flashing lights on the Eiffel Tower which were supposed to be for Year 2000 only and remain to this day, it appears that they decided to keep this tricolor lighting of Terminal 1]

You of course can’t see this display once you have left the satellite, and there are few easily accessible locations landside to see it. Sitting in front of the people mover coming from Terminal 2 and the train station is an option, but it is moving of course.

This sculpture of abandoned pieces of luggage shows the direction of the luggage delivery room and of the exit where there was ID check.

And arrival in the parking lot which had emptied a lot, no surprise on a Friday night. One level was partly off-limits (for repairs?) when I had arrived there, but the number of empty parking spaces did not take into account this reduction of capacity and indicated hundreds of empty parking space whereas it was actually full: I was probably not the only passenger who wasted some time because of that.