Good morning everybody from Medellín, Colombia! 🇨🇴 after a wonderful stay here I can for sure say this is the best city in the entire country that I have visited. Everybody was friendly, roads and infrastructure was efficient and overall everybody here was nice and I didn’t feel at risk of being targeted for theft or anything. Compare this to Cali, the roads have holes in them, people don’t care about traffic rules and there it seems more likely you’ll be robbed. That doesn’t mean Medellín is 100% safe of course not it’s better to be aware of your surroundings and don’t let yourself be taken advantage of or as us Colombians say it, “No das Papaya” and Cali has a BIG traffic problem but they don’t need to have it, Medellín has done many things over the years to help with traffic and it truly shows. Driving here was little to no different as in the US 🇺🇸 the sad part is that Cali has the ability to change but they don’t do anything. Medellín has done A LOT over the years to improve and become more tourist friendly crazy to know this was once one of if not the worlds most dangerous city like 40-30 years ago but it’s truly a different place now which I really like so you can definitely see me returning here either in IF or the real world. I made my way from my apartment in El Poblado to Medellín’s Jose Maria Cordova International Airport in which is technically Rionegro to return our rental car, we still needed to go through the main check in line despite checking in online because of our checked bag so maybe flying Spirit wasn’t the brightest idea especially since my parents can’t pack light to save their lives 😅 now as much I was praising Medellín over Cali I have to admit that CLO looks much better than MDE especially the international terminal 😍 we still had a bit after finally dropping of our bag and clearing security which took a WHOPPING 28 minutes well not the actual security checkpoint that was a breeze, the immigration was the culprit like always, there was a large amount of passengers but not a ton of actual officers which made the process entirely long. CLO usually never has a lot of people in the immigration area but that could just be that MDE is much more busier so as much as I praised the city itself, Cali’s airport in my opinion is superior but that doesn’t mean MDE is a bad airport, I still found it to look decent and it has a good amount of shops airside selling nice souvenirs and the open area right after the immigration control was really cool it definitely beats Fort Lauderdale’s 🏝️🛥️ terminal 3 and MIAs central terminal . Now while waiting in the check in line, my family were offered to upgrade to the exit row seats which obviously provide extra legroom but with one catch, it would put my parents in a row together with a stranger in the aisle but put ME in ANOTHER IN THE MIDDLE between 2 strangers as much as I would’ve loved to have the extra space, being in the middle seat would just do no good for the trip report and I can handle the seats in the back fine and someone taller should get that seat. So I do have a secured window seat for this flight! 👍 by this time we simply just sat down and hung around the terminal since our aircraft was still like 30 minutes away I even payed a visit to the American Airlines Boeing 737-800 who came in from Miami 🏝️😎 but since there isn’t much to say for now, I’ll cut to when our plane arrives.
FLIGHT INFO
Origin: Jose Maria Cordova International 🇨🇴 (SKRG)
Destination: Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Intl 🇺🇸 (KFLL)
Flight Time: 2:56
Airbus A320neo (Spirit Airlines)
Server: None (Real Life)
At gate 14A fresh from FLL is N903NK an almost 8 year old delivered new to Spirit Airlines in November 2016 making this the 3rd Airbus A320neo to be introduced into NKs fleet. Something tells me we will have baby trays on this flight. Next to us is an Avianca A320neo who had just arrived from San Jose, Costa Rica 🇨🇷 and on the left is ANOTHER Sprit A320neo heading to Orlando 🏰🐭 for some reason, I was selected for a secondary search which went as you would expect, annoying but harmless it did help spend the time we had to board so there’s that I guess. 😅
As I expected, our aircraft despite being a neo still had the hard product before the current one so that means we have baby trays 😂 you can send someone a picture of this cabin and they might thing it’s a regular A320ceo. No matter what cabin the neo has, it has the same configuration of 182 seats with 4 big front seats in a 2-2 configuration and the remaining 178 economy class in a 3-3 configuration. My seat will be in the same row as we came in but this time on the left side so that will be 26A. I found it similar to NKs new interior in terms of comfort and we had the same view either way so it didn’t really feel much different. Our taxi did take some time because of ATC issues so the American flight to MIA took off and most likely landed before us so we didn’t win the race this time 😥
Landings here at MDE are pretty straight forward, you do a straight in approach into runway 01. Take offs are quite the opposite, from what I’ve seen even if winds favor RWY 19, aircraft will still land RWY 01 but take off 19 and for some OTHER reason, they use 01 for take offs with 19 so we were assigned to RWY 19 and had to WAIT for a LATAM A320 to take off from RWY 01 which I just found strange.
After probably the most turbulent departure I’ve ever experienced to the point I couldn’t hold my camera straight while filming the game off, we were airborne leaving Medellín behind with Fort Lauderdale 🏝️🛥️ up in the distance!
After a pretty choppy climb out from MDE, we reached our cruising altitude of FL360 before descending down to FL340 and finally going as high as FL380. The crew didn’t begin service immediately as there was still some turbulence but once they got up, they commenced the buy on board service which was typical and they generally seemed friendly so 3 stars for them! ⭐️⭐️⭐️ I want to highlight one, she wasn’t that different from them all but I did notice that she looked like my English teacher which I thought was a bit cool. Now I simply enjoyed the not so existent views to pass the time. With the view currently being an extremely cloudy look below of Colombia’s 🇨🇴 Atlantic coast.
Eventually, Jamaica 🇯🇲 came into view so we are making some good progress.
Eventually Cuba 🇨🇺 came into view and I didn’t experience any Wi-Fi issues this time while flying over Cuban airspace so this isn’t an outage zone as I initially have thought.
After flying off the coast of the Bahamas 🇧🇸 we began our approach into FLL, it would have us flying over the Atlantic Ocean before turning left downwind over Wilton Manors turning base near Weston and coming to land on RWY 10R. and you can see FLL and Hollywood Beach on our crosswind → downwind leg.
After a fairly smooth final approach, welcome back to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport! Ending this trip to Medellín and I honestly had a decent time on Spirit this afternoon. Could it have been more comfortable? Of course but I didn’t feel like sacrificing good views out the window not only for myself but for you guys as well just to have extra legroom. But other than that, I thought Spirit provided a decent service and even after a fairly late departure, we still arrived 11 minutes early so Spirit is a good option for saving money but should you fly them internationally out of FLL? Well not really and we will get to that.
I skipped out on visiting the cockpit as the arrivals process would just get worse now what’s so bad about Spirit at FLL? Well it’s not just Spirit it’s every airline operating international flights here. So we all know how long it takes to do passport control 🛂 at many airports FLL is for sure no exception and it’s the fact that Spirit and other airlines have their arrivals here all around the same time and the facility here isn’t large enough to handle the amount of flights and also doesn’t have the maximum amount of officers working here so it creates long lines. Now this is the only true negative of flying Spirit to Colombia 🇨🇴 but I don’t think it will last as I believe FLL is getting a new terminal 5 which will hopefully have a new passport control facility just to avoid dragging everyone to a tiny one. But there are 2 solutions to this which will probably never happen and they are, the airlines greatly reduce international service to FLL until the new terminal is built or add more stations and hire more officers to make the process more smooth. After describing the troublesome immigration process, how long did it exactly take?
We actually did it in 58 minutes and 46 seconds which quite surprised me since an initial glance at the line made me believe I’d take around an hour and 20 minutes and even then we still lost time because we had to pull out of the line waiting for my dad to get the checked bag but I will be returning to this brutality soon WITHOUT checked bags just to see how long THAT takes. But after that was finally done, we waited for our grandparents to pick us up and drive us home to relax after a pretty fun trip! Anyways, that wraps up this flight on Spirit Airlines older A320neo from Medellín, Colombia 🇨🇴 to Fort Lauderdale 🏝️🛥️ and this trip overall. Stay tuned for August as we head to a new “Caribbean” destination in IF and as always between now and the next time, see you in the sky! 😉👋