Review of Royal Jordanian flight from Amman to Erbil in Economy

Flight RJ824 / AMM-EBL

Todays flight starts as another leg of my flights of summer 2025. I enjoyed a brief, 2 day stay in Jordan over the summer, visiting Amman and Petra.
The start of this journey was rather crazy, including getting stuck in jordanian traffic, being mobbed by taxi drivers trying to hitch a passenger or two, as well as getting in the wrong taxi, with an incredibly incompetent driver, taking many mistaken turns, while attempting to teach some arabic. Annoyingly, due to his driving, we missed the airport coach, and had to call another taxi to the airport, in a very last minute case.
Annoyingly, i forgot to check in online to this flight, which isnt the end of the world as Royal Jordanians website is horrendus, however, we checked in smoothly and quickly for the flight at the desk. This is where i learnt that the flight had been delayed by around 35 minutes.
Security at Queen Alia is relatively smooth, except for getting pulled for my camera to be swab tested.

Boarding for the flight was smooth, using gate 22, which is a Bus gate.
The flight was crowded into around 2 buses, ferrying us to our aircraft which was on a remote stand.

And there she is, the brand new, beautiful E295, registered JY-REF. This aircraft was around 2 months old at the time of flying.
Boarding was a little slow, with passengers waiting a while. Not a problem for me as an avgeek as i get to watch aircraft such as the Qatar A350 push back from its gate!

Another angle of this beautiful bird.

My seat for the next hour and a half, 20C. An absolutely beautiful cabin with a sleek interior. Although i suppose it may just be because of its age! Give it a couple of years and it will probably be a bit scuffed.
Interestingly there is no IFE on board these aircraft, despite the fact that they operate some pretty lengthy routes such as Geneva to Amman, which is around 4 hours, as RJ is an emerging middle eastern airline, I would assume that they would be modernising their interiors with IFE, and not just WiFi (which was not working for me)
However, one big benefit of these seats are the two USB-C ports at your knees in between the seats, sharing with your seatmate. These are a big advantage, especially for longer flights.

Takeoff and Inflight

We departed 44 minutes late, our original departure time was 01:15am, pushing us to 1:59 as our actual departure.
Takeoff was interesting, it felt very bumpy as we went right down the centreline, over the runway lights.
I wasn't familiar with this happening and it felt strange and uncomfortable, as it created a lot of loud bangs.
After takeoff and while climbing, we dipped a little bit and didnt climb it seemed, which was odd to me as i could see all of amman pretty clearly from the altitude.
I mustve been very disorientated, as i thought we had departed Amman on the northern runway, facing towards the east, however we had in fact done the opposite and taken off on the southern and towards the west. This caused us to bank quite steeply towards Erbil, however as i did not know our bearings, i thought we could be returning back to the airport!
Nonetheless, we continued on our way, with a light meal being served at cruising altitude.

Amman, taken while climbing.

The rest of the flight was incredibly uneventful, I believe i just watched youtube the entire rest of the hour and a half.
We took a route over the Jordanian-Iraqi corridor, over provinces such as Fallujah. We came into Erbil from the south, passing the airport on our right before making a right turn onto RWY18.

A short taxi to our gate in Erbil airport. Parked next to an Iraqi Airways 737 Max 8.

Passport control is easy at the airport, especially since im a foreigner who speaks the language.