Smooth flying on a Cathay A350 to Manila

A nice surprise awaited me yesterday as I connected from Hong Kong to a Cathay Pacific flight bound for Manila. At the gate was an Airbus A350.

Cathay has just five A350-900s in service, having started taking delivery of the widebody earlier this year. It has 22 -900s on order, including those delivered, plus 26 of the larger -1000 variant, which starts its flight-test program this year. For Hong Kong-based Cathay, the aircraft will form the backbone of its mid-size long-haul fleet, replacing aircraft like the Airbus A340​.

In addition to short-haul routes such as Hong Kong-Manila, Cathay is already deploying the A350 on long-haul routes such as Auckland, Dusseldorf and London Gatwick.

My flight, CX907, was just over two hours and we cruised at 41,000ft – a smooth and A380-level quiet flight. It was my third A350 flight – I flew one of the test aircraft in 2015 out of Toulouse and on a Finnair delivery flight from Toulouse to Helsinki later that year.

But this was my first scheduled commercial flight (and also the first A350 flight for some of the cabin crew). Aside from being pin-drop quiet, the A350 cabin is very spacious, has large windows, high ceilings, large bins that come down low for loading but seem to then vanish into those ceilings on closing, and huge galley areas.

Cathay has styled its cabins in neutral beige, adding to the spacious feel, and the business/first cabin, with its 1-2-1 layout so all passengers have an aisle and lie-flat seat/beds, looks sophisticated.

The oneworld airline expects to have 22 A350s in service by end of 2017. Welcome to the new standard of commercial airline flying.

Karen Walker [email protected]