BAckground
For a background on this trip, please refer back to the WN3338 report. This report will cover the HOU-SJC flight with a stopover in AUS, one of the novelties of flying on a carrier with a point-to-point model.
routing
Our simple routing:
Flight routing
- 1
- 2WN3383, HOU-SJC, Boeing B737-MAX8, Economy
pre-flight
Although our plane was late leaving DEN, we still planned to arrive at the airport ~2h before departure expecting there to be long lines due to the surge of passengers being rebooked following WN's meltdown over the holiday period. The iconic approach to Houston-Hobby down Telephone Road, where the old terminal was located back in ye olde times, often enables some nice buzzing of WN B737s dropping in over the fence line to land on Runway 04, which receives a bulk of the inbound traffic.
Yes, we arrived at the correct airport in Houston.
WN's king at Hobby. There are some strangers infiltrating throughout the day, but you need to have eagle eyes to catch where their check-in counters are located. UA, of course, is the only of the US3 not serving HOU for an obvious reason.
Our premonition that it would be a zoo was horribly wrong. Walking in, the full service counters were completely empty with 3 staff standing around chatting. As we approached, they quickly helped us take care off our pet fee, processed our bags (overweight bag was ignored), and handed us our boarding passes.
With boarding passes in hand, we were quickly on our way over to security, which was quickly cleared with TSA PreCheck.
Clearing security, Hobby is prominently displaying its award of being the first 5* Skytrax Airport in North America. It is a decent airport, but it also lacks any type of lounge so not sure what passenger experience factors go into Skytrax's ratings.
Hobby is more themed than Intercontinental, and has several Space City exhibits throughout honoring the cities' close ties to NASA.
Hobby is very compact and no gate is more than a 5 minute walk from the central dining/shopping area.
FIDS now showing our flight with a 15 minute delay.
We took a seat at the gate across from ours since it was empty. The seating areas in the "older" wings of HOU have power charging between every pair of seats..
Our bird of the day, which would be my first time on a MAX.
HOU-AUS flight
Southwest Airlines, WN 3383
Equipment: Boeing 737-MAX8 [N8575Z, delivered January 2020]
Departure: 15:50 (ATD: 16:08)
Arrival: 16:45 (ATA: 16:38)
Flight Time: 0:30
Boarding was called on time and we boarded in family boarding after the A groups.
Our seats on this newish MAX8.
The pitch is very good for economy at ~33" with even room to cross your legs comfortably.
A picture of the cabin during boarding with the blue and red mood lighting found on the WN MAXs.
The seat back contents.
Push back was at 16:00 with the safety demonstration done by the crew as we backed out of our gate. The pilots announced a flight time of 32 minutes to AUS and due to the chance of some turbulence in the hill country, they would not release the flight crew and leave the seatbelt sign on the entire flight.
We aligned for take off on Runway 22 today, which is atypical since most traffic comes in on Runway 04.
We start our westerly trek to Austin, with downtown Houston visible on this clear day.
Downtown Houston.
Texas Medical Center and Rice University.
NRG Stadium dwarfing the Astrodome.
The sprawl of Houston as we leave along the I-10.
IAH in the distance.
WiFi was turned on as we leveled off, which would last just 8 minutes on this flight before we start our descent into Austin-Bergstrom.
The hill country is below as we approach Austin.
Downtown Austin as we turn into AUS.
We had a smooth landing on Runway 18L at 16:38 ahead of schedule and head back towards the terminal.
AA A319 departing for DFW.
KL B789 preparing to return to AMS.
DL A220.
We pull into Gate 18 at 16:43.
Deplaning was quick and the departing crew performed a head count of through passengers. There were just 9 of us continuing on to SJC. Once the count was done we were told we were free to change seats and use the lavatories.
I'll take this time to get some clean cabin shots.
My son enjoyed watching them unload the baggage hold and refill the plane to kill the time during the crew change.
A WN B737 in the old livery pulls in next to us.
AUS-SJC Flight
Southwest Airlines, WN 3383
Equipment: Boeing 737-MAX8 [N8575Z, delivered January 2020]
Departure: 17:30 (ATD: 17:59)
Arrival: 19:20 (ATA: 19:43)
Flight Time: 3:44
It was just a 25-minute turnaround and boarding started again at 17:08 once the new crew came on board. This crew would be handling the AUS-SJC-SAN legs.
After boarding completed, the captain came out to give his remarks and inform us that we will be late departing since we will be waiting for the arrival a flight from MCO with several connecting passengers.
We finally pushed back at 17:51 to start the 2nd leg of this flight.
Dusk falls on AUS.
We turn to align on Runway 18R and take off to the south about 30 minutes behind schedule.
Lifting up gives views of Austin as the sun falls.
The drink menu and instructions to connect to the WiFi and IFE.
The safety card on this MAX8.
After some turbulence, the crew were into the aisles to take drink orders and then handed out snacks as we were passing over Midland/Odessa. The snacks have expanded recently and the snack mix is now accompanied by a sweet snack as well, but I digress.
Drinks were handed out as we approached El Paso.
WN's napkins are at least a little bit more interesting than those found on UA.
The streaming IFE service on WN is quite good. Their price is only $8 for WiFi (all day and not limited to a single flight), and offer a substantial selection of free movies/TV/music for streaming, live TV, and free texting. The only downside of course is the absence of charging ports.
The flight information is also comprehensive and the moving map has a lot of functionality. The conversion to metric will be appreciated by most.
We rested for most of the flight as our son slept, but due to the heavy rainfall in California, the final 40 minutes was very turbulent. We did the standard approach into SJC to land on Runway 30L onto a wet tarmac and were on the ground about 25 minutes behind schedule so were unable to make up any of the delay in AUS.
We pulled into our gate and were quickly deplaned into the quiet terminal on New Year's Eve.
Bags were quickly off the carousel and we were home less than an hour after landing.
Flight information for the HOU-AUS leg.
Flight information for the AUS-SJC leg.
This concludes this series, thanks for stopping by!
Or wonderfully wrong, in this case. Where's everyone?? It looks like they decided to spend New Year's eve watching Netflix! :O
Amazing! :O
That's new for me. Do you mean the passengers boarding here and those connecting from MCO didn't have seats assigned? I'm scratching my head.
That's a very nice-looking cabin!
Definitely. Thank you!
Fantastic! That's every traveler's dream, I guess, especially if you are traveling with children.
Well, I'll let Dionne Warwick know that I found someone who knows the way to San José. lol
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Pilpintu,
WN does free boarding, there are no assigned seats. You are assigned your boarding slot at check-in and take whatever seat you want or is available depending on your boarding slot. It's designed to expedite boarding since people are not looking for an assigned seat. Those people from MCO were the proud owners of whatever middle seats were left.
She was probably on that flight from LAX or BUR.
Thanks for stopping by!
I usually don't have anything nice to say about SWA but that's a pretty good looking cabin compared to the sad brown cabins I knew back in the day (haven't flown them in over a decade and you couldn't pay me to). That and it's great that they have streaming IFE--it's crazy how few people who fly SWA actually know that they have IFE, but then again, they don't make it super obvious.
Ok, that's the extent of the nice things I have to say. Totally agree that it's crazy that brand new 737 MAX don't have any sort of charging. They made a huge deal about finally installing USB ports in the seats like a year ago and here we are a year later with a grand total of ONE aircraft out there with USB ports out of a gazillion in the fleet. Your comments about the cabin crew seem more and more common. I used to fly SWA pretty frequently in my college days and FAs were always super friendly, even too over-the-top friendly and laid-back with their khaki shorts, polos, and white sneakers haha. Now it seems that fun attitude has mostly disappeared. I'm sure there are great crews out there and a lot of this is growing pains with SWA having gotten so huge over the last decade, but overall this does not seem to be the same SWA of 15-20 years ago.
Nevertheless, I understand why so many people fly them and they offer an overall good product.
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Kevin, thanks for stopping by. This is pretty much the only route we have flown/would fly on WN since it connects convenient minor airports. Now that UA has restored their SJC-IAH route to a normal schedule (non redeye) and has been price-matching WN on this routing, we have flipped back recently. In addition to the crews being weaker on WN nowadays, I find a lot of ground delays due to connecting pilots, which is irritating when the plane is fully boarded and ready, but no one to fly it... That said, WN fills a lot of gaps for a lot of people with its vast point-to-point network, especially for business travelers that want to avoid transits in hubs when going between secondary markets.
I thought you were done saying nice things ;) Those old brown liveries were built to survive the dust from west Texas.