South African Airways A340-200 Landing at Cape Town International

[Cambridgeflyer]

Looks like you pulled the short straw flying the A340-200, old and out of date! The product from SAA on the A340-300/600 is much better with PTV's (minus one or two from Iberia) and the new A330-200's all have brand new seats and entertainment systems!

[pacnfl]

Sorry to hear about your seats, the a340 is by far the best aircraft I've flown on but a majority of airlines don't have any entertainment.

[MISTERMORNE]

Sorry to hear about the bad experience. I actually like your video clip, seeing that I lived in Cape Town for 28 years and I've always wanted to see what it looks like from up there :-)

[markgodbolt]

@MISTERMORNE The price was right, was coming out for the world cup. It was a long 13 hours in such an uncomfortable seat with no entertainment. Perhaps a one off from SAA?

[MISTERMORNE]

@markgodbolt - no, I won't recommend flying SAA - and it is important for one to check what type of plane you get when you book your ticket. Some other airliners with the same model planes might have schematics that you could Google for. That could give you a pretty good idea of facilities too I remember my first long haul flight was with Air France and I knew that when I saw it was on an A380-800 (which was clearly stated on my e-ticket) that it was going to be something special. And it was.

[markgodbolt]

@MISTERMORNE I have been on other SAA flights that have been really good. I remember flying to Heathrow from JHB in the 80's on the 747-300, steak for breakfast, as much beer and wine as you wanted. But when you are competing on the Europe to Cape Town route with KLM, British Airways, Lufthansa you have to have a decent plane / product. With the 340-200 SAA are way behind the European carriers. BA are without doubt the best on the Cape Town to Europe route.

[MISTERMORNE]

@markgodbolt I think one must be honest and say that SAA is a relatively small player and cannot in all respects compete to KLM, BA, Air France or Lufthansa who can afford big planes like A380s. I can imagine that BA is a good carrier, most quotes I ever got from them were rather expensive compared to SAA for example. And in the 1980's the Rand was equal to the US dollar. Now that it's much weaker, I think that running costs are much higher to give similar meals like in the 1980's for example

[migzau]

@markgodbolt i flew BA between Cape Town and Heathrow and it was horrible experience. I will never fly with them again. The next time I used Virgin Atlantic and they were amazing. I have never tried SAA on that route but did fly them to Australia and they had entertainment but I think it was the A340-600?

[MISTERMORNE]

@markgodbolt I wanted to add you can just sleep through your flight if there's no entertainment, but then I could not even sleep in an A380-800 with its little bit of more space! So I seriously get that you were quite uncomfortable in that plane with seats AND no entertainment. But if what danman10131 said is true, hopefully that would also improve the flight experience a little. Once again, thank you for posting. As for SAA, they are continuously writing their own testimonial (good or bad)...

[danman10131]

Thank god SAA is starting to replace these with the new A330-200's...

[SuperStylerAtze]

how long was the fly?

[markgodbolt]

@SuperStylerAtze 13 hours too long!!!