frasensei: AIR ONE Rome-Alghero

AIR ONE
Rome (FCO)- Alghero (AHO)
Boeing 737-400

Check-in for Air One flights to Sardinia takes place at Rome Fiumicino's "Leonardo da Vinci" Airport Terminal 1. Being this an early September Sunday morning flight, the terminal building is not crowded at all.

I try to use the self-service check-in Kiosks because I had some bad experiences with front-line staff in this airport before, but I cannot change the 5B, middle seat, preassigned seat, even though the seat map shows an almost empty flight. Therefore I am forced to go to a normal counter.

To my surprise, the agent is very kind and in less than a minute my boarding pass is issued, with a new window seat (5F). I asked for a seat on the right side of the airplane because otherwise all the pictures would be into sun.

Security checks are conducted in a quick and professional way. Boarding is through gate B29, and requires a bus transfer to the aircraft. From the computer at the gate I am able to see how many passengers there will be on this flight: just 42, out of the 162 available seats, definitely a light load. Therefore a single bus run is enough to transfer everybody to the aircraft. Doors are closed immediately thereafter and at 9.15 we are off blocks, perfectly on time.

There's no traffic whatsoever and therefore we take off immedialtely from runway 25, the one usually used for take offs.

Runway 16L, on which I had touched down just 4 hours earlier inbound from Kuala Lumpur.

At 9.40 the in-flight service is started, consisting of cold and hot drinks plus a choice of sweet or savoury snacks. Unlike some previous experiences on Air One, especially with stewards, today's cabin crew are very kind and smiley, they eve say "thank you"!