Yesterday, I flew Southwest Airlines, on a flight from Chicago to Norfolk via Nashville. If you are wondering why I was flying via Nashville and not somewhere else say like Baltimore, My Family were not going to get up at 3am for the 6:30 flight from MDW-BWI. So anyway let’s get right on into it!
We arrived at MDW at 12:55 for our 15:10 flight to BNA, Check-in and Security was a breeze. We were the only ones in the line, I think it took 3 minutes from stepping out of our car to get past Security.
For people not familiar with Midway here is some quick information. Firstly, this is not Chicago’s first airport. Chicago’s first airport is O’Hare International Airport (ORD). This is Chicago’s second airport. Midway is dominated by Southwest, and today the only flights I saw was Southwest. However, other airlines that do operate out of MDW are Allegiant, Porter, Volaris, Ultimate Air Shuttle, and Delta.
We arrived at our gate, B17 which has excellent views of Runway 22L and 22R, which were the active runways for the first part of the day. As you can see from the top picture, if two aircraft are in B17 and B19, views are slightly hindered.
Here is our plane, N7702A a 16 year old Boeing 737-700 aircraft. This aircraft was originally delivered to AirTran in 2004, and was transferred to Southwest in 2012.
For the time being, Southwest is doing a modified boarding process. Instead of groups of 30, the boarding process was in groups of 10. They made this very clear in the Pre-Boarding announcement at the gate.
We boarded the aircraft, and chose our seats, 7A and 7C. According to Seatguru, most seats on this aircraft were 17 inches in width and had 31 inches in Pitch. As you can see from the picture legroom was fine for me, and I am 5’6.
We took off at 3:22 from Runway 31C and headed south towards Nashville.
Inflight service began 15 minutes after takeoff, of course for now the service is limited. We were served a snack mix and a cup of water. For this 58 minute flight, the service was good even if it was limited.
We then landed in Nashville, while we were taxiing I saw Virgin Australia 737-800s parked on the far side. I’m guessing for storage but why out of all places BNA?If anyone knows the reason feel free to let me know because I am genuinely intrigued.
After taxiing we pulled into the gate. We then got off of the plane and headed over to the brand new D concourse. Where our plane to Norfolk was waiting. I must say, the new concourse is very nice and open with lots of glass and few barriers for seeing out onto the ramp.
Connection time was a little tight so I wasn’t able to get a shot of our second aircraft, a 10 year old Boeing 737-700 registered N7867A so here is one from Jetphotos!
We were the 2nd and 3rd people to board the aircraft even though our boarding positions were 18 and 19 so here is a shot of the jet bridge which was really long!
We took off on our 1:25 flight from Nashville to Norfolk. Service was similar to the last flight, and so was the seat so nothing much to write about here. The views over West Virginia and Western Virginia were very nice with the mountain range running through them.
We then began our decent into Norfolk and the approach into ORF has a few notable things on in. We have The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Langley AFB, and Norfolk harbor, which contains a large amount of US Navy ships, including Aircraft Carriers so be on the look for them!
We made a bumpy final approach and landing for runway 20 at Norfolk and arrived 40 minutes early, which would be great on a long haul flight but for a flight that was supposed to take 2 hours was incredible!
Overall, it was a good flight and Southwest made sure their planes were clean and you could tell the safety of their passengers were at the top of their list. This was my first flight in over a year due to the current world situation and I was happy to finally get onboard a plane again!
Score
Ground Experience: 8/10
Seat: 9/10
Food: 8/10
Service: 10/10
Overall: 35/40