Review of TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon to Washington in Economy

Pre-Flight

Bom dia and welcome to my single-aisle transatlantic flight from Lisbon to Washington!

Our adventure begins at Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport, coming in on a connecting flight from London, and I get to experience the joys of Lisbon’s non-Schengen terminal for roughly 2 hours.

The terminal, put lightly, is terrible. It is poorly designed, has very few restaurants and duty-free shops, and the necessities like bathrooms and wi-fi are middling at best. The non-Schengen terminal resembles one long, narrow, snaking hallway, with shops, restaurants, and other services on one side, and boarding gates on the other. There are exceptions to this rule, namely with the spectacular decision by airport management to put about four or five boarding gates directly in the middle of that hallway!

Lisbon follows the usual European gate assignment system, where boarding gates are announced roughly 45 minutes before boarding. The trade-off that I have seen in other airports is to have an adequate amount of seating in a central area with a little bit by the gate, but Lisbon didn’t really have that setup. Instead, seating is scattered around the terminal kind of haphazardly, which leads to a perpetual sense of confusion. Confusion that I later experienced in my own way.

After an hour or so of browsing for snacks and duty-free merchandise, my flight’s gate was announced, so I dutifully made my way towards gate 45A. I knew I’d be in for a fun ride when I noticed there were about 40 seats at the gate for a plane that holds 171 passengers. I was lucky enough to grab a seat, where I hunkered down for a little while.

About 20 minutes later, a group of Portuguese police officers shooed everyone out of the gate area, cordoned it off, and told everyone to line up outside the cordon for a secondary passport check. After about 15 minutes of queueing, an airport official with a good sense of humor let me back into the cordoned area.

Boarding started spontaneously 25 minutes later, with no audible announcement whatsoever. Everyone just kind of figured it out at their own speed. This being a full flight, I was told to gate-check my carry-on. This was a relief, because my liter of duty free Macieira brandy was getting heavy and now I wouldn’t have to worry about it in the cabin. When I asked where I should leave it, the gate agent waved me along, so I went down the escalator to a bus with my bag still in tow.

The bus filled up gradually, and got on its way to the remote stand about as gradually. We passed some parked planes, and 15 minutes later, and we’re off the bus, and on the tarmac next to our home for the next 7 hours. With no further clarity about where to drop my bag, I asked a kind-looking ramp agent and he said to leave it on the tarmac and that he’d take care of it. Simple enough, I suppose, but also a little surreal.

Boarding and Flight Experience

TAP boards its remote stand narrowbodies through both the front and rear doors, which is a genuinely a good move to boost efficiency in such an over-capacity airport. As I was walking up the rear stairs, I saw the ramp agent grab my bag and take it to get loaded on.

My bird was CS-TXL, a 2.6 year old Airbus A321XLR, delivered to TAP in January 2023.
The cabin is laid out in a 3-3 configuration in economy, with seats that look exactly like a long-haul economy seat in a widebody. Each seat has an adjustable headrest, a personal TV, USB charging, and a universal power outlet. I can’t comment on the legroom, because TAP was nice enough to seat me in the emergency exit row. The IFE system had plenty of TV shows and movies, an interactive flight map, and a few games. I was delighted to see that TAP’s IFE had Pose, one of my favorite shows, so I binged that for a few hours. The plane also had wi-fi for purchase, and free access to messaging apps. I used the free service, and WhatsApp worked fine for me, so no complaints there.

An hour and a half into the flight, dinner was served. Economy had a choice between pasta (spinach and ricotta tortellini) and chicken (with honey mustard sauce, carrots, and saffron rice). I chose the chicken and it came with a tuna and potato salad, a roll, crackers, spreadable cheese, and a custard dessert. Beer, wine, and soft drinks were available on the beverage service, so I got a very serviceable Portuguese syrah. The dinner was very decent for an economy meal on a narrowbody, and even came with metal silverware. It left me satisfied, feeling like TAP put some care into their catering, more so than my journey with United a few days earlier.

After a blissfully uneventful few hours of watching TV and dozing off over the Atlantic, it was time for the pre-arrival snack box. The box had a cold sandwich and a Portuguese brownie (salame de chocolate, literally chocolate salami). The sandwich was unremarkable and mostly sourdough with some Portuguese cold cuts for flair. The brownie was fantastic, which is a strange thing to say about an airplane brownie, but it deserved the praise

We made landfall over northern New Jersey after flying in more or less a straight line over the Atlantic. Turning south over southern Pennsylvania, we began to descend into Dulles. Trash was collected one last time, and the flight crew apparently locked the doors to the bathrooms, so nobody would be able to get up and go during final approach and descent. We arrived at Dulles about an hour early, speaking to what seems to be a ton of schedule padding.

Deplaning was reasonably quick as we filed down the plane’s single aisle, into a jetway, through a hallway and into one of Dulles’s famous moon buggies. All moon buggies are named with two-letter state abbreviations, and this one, “ME”, was named for Maine. Our moon buggy was in decent shape (none of that old ratty red carpeting) and was able to fit all of us, so we rolled over to the customs and immigration checkpoint in our mobile sterile corridor.

With Global Entry and no other competing flights, I made it through customs and immigration in about 3 minutes. As I was waiting for TAP’s bags to come out, I noticed that two very different flights from two very different cities shared a baggage carousel near mine: ET’s flight from ADD/LFW and BA’s flight from LHR. It seemed like Dulles had a sense of humor.

I collected my bag that I left on the tarmac in Lisbon quickly, and dutifully walked up and down some escalators, through a tunnel, and up to the Metro platform to take me to my final destination. It was getting late by then, so thank goodness for the Silver Line.