United A321neo Economy Review
Flight Number: UA2418
Airline: United Airlines
Departure Airport: Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD/KORD)
Arrival Airport: San Francisco International Airport (SFO/KSFO)
Aircraft: Airbus A321neo (N44550 - 100 Year Anniversary Livery)
Flight Time: 3 hours, 53 minutes
Seat: 36A (Economy)
Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport is the busiest in the world, and that was quite apparent early this Sunday morning at Terminal One. T1 is dominated by the hometown airline and their regional subsidiary (United and United Express), but it’s also used by Air Canada, Air China, Aer Lingus, and Air India.
United has a very handy curbside bag drop for passengers who have checked in online, and that took maybe 90 seconds of my time and avoided the throngs of people inside the terminal. The TSA line was pretty long, and PreCheck took about twenty minutes to clear. I’m not sure if this is just due to the sheer volume of passengers or the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown (or a combination of both).
Once through security, I had some time to kill in the C concourse before our boarding time of 7:05 AM. As the sun came up, I got a good luck at N44550, my ride to the Bay Area today. It wears the 100 Year Anniversary Livery, which honestly is very mid. You can do better, United.
I was one of the last people to board, and given the fact that it was a full flight, I couldn’t get a photo of an empty row of seats for this review. So, you’ll have to enjoy this photo from Airline Geeks of United’s A321neo Economy Class instead. The seat itself is pretty comfortable. The padding is fairly generous, and the headrest has some nice range to adjust. Would I want to fly to Johannesburg in that chair? No. Is it totally above sufficient for the sectors this aircraft does? Yep.
(Image Credit)
We pushed off the gate a few minutes ahead of schedule. They had a nice safety video that played on the IFE screen (more on that in a minute), then a short clip promoting their credit card. The flight crew was very friendly, and the pilot gave a detailed announcement about our route and expected turbulence before we taxied out to Runway 27L. The A321neo taking off is pretty amazing, I must say. Enjoy the below video:
Inflight service got off to a slow start today, which was completely appropriate. From about eight minutes into the flight all the way past Omaha, we were getting bounced around quite a bit. It was nothing horrible (higher end light chop with maybe a smattering of moderate), but enough that the flight attendants had to stay seated in their jumpseats per the captain. Once things did get rolling somewhere over Kansas, I ordered the Tapas Snack Box ($10), plus a free apple juice and a stroopwafel. The Tapas box is about what one might expect - hummus, almonds, various chips and crackers, and olives. If you’re taking a longer flight in United’s Economy packing something more substantial might be advisable, but it most certainly gets the job done.
United has a pretty incredible IFE system on their A321neo. The screen itself is large and has a fair amount of tilt up and down. It’s extremely responsive, close to using an iPad. There’s a great variety of movies, TV shows, and other forms of media available for free. I’d like to give a special shoutout to the designers of the tracking map, which is the best I’ve ever encountered. There was even a special icon for our plane specifically with the 100 Year Anniversary sticker on it.
I paid $8 for Wi-Fi. It’s whatever the regular system is (not StarLink), and it worked OK. It’s not particularly practical to stream music or YouTube videos, but I was able to text, email, and track on FlightRadar24 with a reasonable amount of buffering. StarLink is being rolled out fleetwide at United, and that will definitely be a gamechanger.
The flight today went by pretty fast, and it was time to start our approach into San Francisco as we crossed the Nevada - California border. The cabin crew made a final run through to collect trash as we began to descend out of FL300. Winter is California’s rainy season, so things were nice and lush below us all the way into SFO. Sadly no parallel approach today.
We landed a whopping 54 minutes early, which worked only sorta to our benefit. Our gate was occupied by an aircraft that was late due to maintenance issues. The Captain was very communicative about his efforts to find another gate we could use, but apparently the ground staff was spread thin and couldn’t accommodate us elsewhere. We had to sit on an active taxiway (meaning seatbelts must be on) for about twenty minutes, but then we ended up hanging out the rest of the time on the ramp. We were allowed to get up, and the flight attendants came through with a water service. I guess something changed with staffing availability, because after about 45 minutes of waiting around, the crew let us know that we had secured a different gate. We got over to D7 and had to wait another ten minutes or so because they didn’t have anyone to marshall us in. Despite having to sit around on the ground for a bit, we arrived at SFO nine minutes ahead of our blocked time, which is a win in my book.
Final Thoughts:
United’s A321neo is probably one of the best economy products you’re going to get domestically. The IFE is extraordinary, and the introduction of StarLink is huge. The crew was consistently nice and kept us well-informed during our ground delay.
