Pohnpei

Continental Micronesia CS957 | HNL/MAJ
Economy Class
N14250 | Boeing 737-800
ATD/0706 | ATA/1012+1

I arrived at HNL at 0545. There were about a dozen people in line for the Island Hopper. As this was an international flight, I could not use the automated check-in kiosks. There were four check-in desks open for the flight. I waited in line for about 10 minutes before reaching the desk. While in line, I had a pleasant chat with the passenger in line ahead of me, who was a retired guy traveling to MAJ to do some fishing.

I presented my Singapore passport to the check-in agent and he asked me if I needed a visa to enter the Federated States of Micronesia. I said that I did not need one for visits of less than 90 days, and he seemed to take my word for it. I had originally been assigned seat 7E, and I asked him if I could have an aisle. He said that the flight was oversold, but he did get me seat 22D, which I gratefully accepted.

There was only a short line at security, and I cleared through in no time. I then took a short detour to Starbuck’s, and then backtracked to Gate 14. Already at the gate was the CEO of my client company as well as some of his staff. As we were expecting some aspects of my presentation to be slightly contentious, I was advised by them not to discuss my presentation and project until we were behind closed doors in Pohnpei because some board members were on the same flight.

Boarding commenced at about 0630, with BusinessFirst boarding first, followed by OnePass elite members, then passengers with infants. After that, they called passengers in rows 21 to 29. Upon boarding, I saw that the 738 was very clean and the cabin looked very smart. They had pop down screens and on it they played images of reefs, alternating with screens saying “35 Years at Home in the Islands”. I guessed that this is the 35th anniversary of the Island Hopper, and the Purser’s first announcement confirmed this. In the seat pocket were two different inflight duty free magazines, one of which was completely in Japanese.

As I settled into my seat, a very large man who needed a seatbelt extension sat at the window seat. Luckily there wasn’t anyone occupying the middle seat – I would have felt very sorry for them. Boarding was completed at about 0650. The Economy cabin was only about 70% full, so I guess the overbooking wasn’t on the HNL-MAJ sector but perhaps on the other segments.

Before closing the aircraft door, a gate agent announced on the aircraft PA that all bags had been loaded, and he went on to say that we should approach the local ground staff immediately if our bags are not received at the destination. I had been told by my client to avoid checking in baggage because bags frequently got mishandled, and this confirmed that there indeed was a problem on this service. This comes as no surprise as this is a multi-sector flight with bulk loaded bags and cargo. I guess the announcement was made so that passengers whose bags had not been offloaded could alert the ground staff who could hopefully alert the ramp staff to look for the missing bags if the aircraft was still on the ground.

Cabin doors were closed at 0655, and we pushed back a few minutes late at 0706. The safety demonstration featured Gordon Bethune welcoming passengers on board, and he stressed that CO still provided meals on board and other “things that make service a priority at CO”. After that, the SVP of Flight Operations (a woman captain) was featured, followed by three Guam-based flight attendants, and then one each from Houston, Tokyo and Palau. It has been more than a year since I flew CO, and I don’t seem to recall so many Pacific-based flight attendants on the video. I wonder if Continental Micronesia has its own safety video.

Taxi to runway 08R (the reef runway) was long, and takeoff commenced at 0724. Takeoff roll was very short, and before long we were on our way. We reached cruising altitude at 32,000 feet relatively quickly, and the flight attendants walked through the cabin with arrival forms for the Marshall Islands for passengers disembarking at MAJ and KWA. This aircraft did not feature personal inflight entertainment screens. The flight attendants also walked down the aisle with headsets for sale, but I decided not to purchase them because the movies they were screening on this flight and on the return sector were made-for-tv movies that didn’t appear too interesting. Hardly anyone watched the movies. Scanning through the entertainment guide, I saw that most of the movies systemwide were rather mediocre. I wonder why CO has such poor programming?

Breakfast was served very quickly after we reached cruising altitude. We had a choice of egg or pancakes, and I chose the eggs. I got an omelet, a small sausage and a small tomato on a bed of rice. I usually cannot handle rice for breakfast, but my body clock was on West Coast time and I was hungry, so I wolfed it all down. Also on the tray were a cup of orange juice, a fruit plate, a croissant, and jam and butter. Not surprisingly, the croissant was hard. The drinks cart came right after that and I had a coffee. Breakfast items were cleared very quickly, which was a bit of a surprise to me because on my limited experience with CO they tended to give passengers a generous amount of time to finish eating. In fact, the passenger across the aisle was scrambling to finish his meal.

90 minutes in the flight, we encountered some turbulence and the seatbelt sign remained lit for about 30 minutes. We encountered another brief bout of turbulence later. During the flight, the flight attendants walked through the cabin twice with water, and a bar service was done an hour before landing. We were given a triple chocolate chip cookie each, and a drink of our choice. Typically for CO, they did not give us the entire can.

The signage on this aircraft is a mystery to me. The emergency exit signs were in English and Chinese. In the lavatory, some signs were in English and Japanese, some in English/Chinese, and some in English and Tagalog (I recognized the Tagalog word for trash - "basura"). I wonder why they did not standardize all signs with two or three languages, especially since this is a very new aircraft.

We began our descent into MAJ and flew into dense clouds and bad turbulence. I’m not a nervous flyer but this time I put down my seat arm and held on. Some people screamed as the aircraft shook. Once we cleared this cloud, it was smooth sailing and we touched down on a very sunny MAJ runway and taxied to the terminal at the end of the runway.Read more