About three months before our trip, we found a good economy class fare for our trip, from San Francisco (SFO) to Vienna, and returning from Munich to SFO. Since there are no direct flights from SFO to Vienna, we looked at itineraries with a stop in each direction. We booked with Delta Airlines, which shares revenue with Air France and KLM for their flights across the Atlantic. Therefore, we were able to book our outbound segment on KLM, with a 4.5-hour layover in Amsterdam. The flight timings were as follows:

KLM 777-200 Flight from SFO to Amsterdam (Aircraft swap from usual 787-9)

Scheduled Departure: 1:50 p.m. on Friday December 1st, 2017

Scheduled Arrival: 9:50 a.m. on Saturday December 2nd, 2017

Flight Duration: 11 hours

Class of Service: Economy

KLM 737-800 Flight from Amsterdam to Vienna

Scheduled Departure: 2:20 p.m. on Saturday December 2st, 2017

Scheduled Arrival: 4:25 p.m. on Saturday December 2nd, 2017

Flight Duration: 2 hours 5 minutes

Class of Service: Economy

Since my friends and I all lived in Berkeley at the time, we worked remotely in the morning and caught a rideshare to SFO around 11:30 a.m. I spent my morning working from the 1951 coffee company’s Channing Way location, which is a nonprofit dedicated to offering jobs to refugees into the US. The year 1951 is significant to them because that’s the year when the Refugee Convention was held, stipulating that a refugee would not be forced to return to a country where their life was at risk. The cafe has infographics on the wall which explain the process that refugees go through to adjust to life in the US and to get citizenship. They make excellent coffee and although it can get crowded with students in the afternoons, in the mornings it is usually a peaceful place to work. At 11 I went straight to Taco Sinaloa, grabbing a couple tacos ahead of our trip to the airport. My friends ate on their own and I walked to their place shortly thereafter to all catch a rideshare together. A typical price at the time for Berkeley to SFO was about $45 for the Lyft, coming out to around $11 each for the four of us. Since it was noon, traffic was light over the normally crowded Bay Bridge, and we got to SFO at around 12:30 p.m. with around 80 minutes to spare. 

Checking our bags went smoothly, and soon enough we were through security as well. While my friends decided to wait near the gate area, I burned the remaining time before boarding by wandering through the terminal and taking photos of the planes and terminal artwork. First I spotted our KLM plane, nicknamed the Flying Dutchman. I thought that was a nice touch, although upon landing in Amsterdam I learned that all of their planes have that name… Next was also the Qantas 747 that flies to Sydney, which they’ve sadly but understandably retired now. Lastly was a side-by-side of Air France and Japan Airlines 777-300ERs. We could have flown Air France to Vienna instead, but their 1 hour layover didn’t leave much room for delays, and there’s always the risk of your flight being cancelled by their strike-happy workforce. To this day I still haven’t flown them, partially for that reason. SFO also hangs up a few large art installations in this terminal. I appreciated the saxophone cacophony in particular because I used to play that instrument in my high school’s marching band. 

Because I don’t make an effort to board economy class early enough to snap empty cabin photos, and the meals weren’t remarkable enough to be photographed, I sadly don’t have any photos of the flight itself. I do have a couple of things to note, however. KLM’s 777’s have 10-across seating, meaning that the middle of rows will have 4 seats instead of the 3 found on their 787s. For the lowest tiers of economy fares, you have the option of paying to reserve a seat at the time of booking. However, when you check in up to 48 hours before flying, you can assign yourself a seat then if you haven’t already. While families might still find it worthwhile to purchase seats together beforehand, I didn’t care about sitting beside my friends and was able to snag an aisle seat near the back of the plane, in a row that currently had an empty middle seat. I choose the back of the plane because passengers who still don’t assign themselves seats are assigned the remaining seats, usually middle ones, front to back. So sitting in the back of the aircraft will maximize your chances of scoring an empty seat next to you, with the  only real cost being that it takes you around 5 more minutes to deplane than the front of economy class. Our flight was delayed leaving the gate for around an hour, for a reason I don’t remember. And we used the shorter east-facing runway for takeoff, which surprised me since it’s shorter and longhaul aircraft almost always use SFO’s longer northwest runway. Even from the west coast I have trouble falling asleep on early transatlantic departures, and I remember watching The Circle and a couple other films between resting my eyes. Time passed quickly enough and we landed around 10 a.m. the next day in Amsterdam, in fog so heavy that I couldn’t even see the runway outside until we touched down.

The train from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to their central railway station clocks in at just 15 minutes, one of the fastest out there. By the time my friends and I cleared EU customs though, it was already 10:30 a.m., leaving us just under 4 hours until our next flight departed. While we could theoretically make it into the city and back, eating a meal there would be risky. One of our friends had Priority Pass lounge access, so we went to a couple of those. However, they were so crowded that there was no seating left, and they’d stopped letting people in. So we hunkered down at some tables, got lunch from an airport cafe, and passed the time playing chess. Although the fog was causing nearly every flight out of Amsterdam that day to be delayed, our flight to Vienna managed to board and depart on time. I don’t have much to say about this leg, other than that I fell asleep the whole way after failing to do so on the longer segment. I did notice upon boarding that KLM somehow moved a Fokker 100 plane onto the airport terminal’s roof. And our plane used a remote stand in Vienna, meaning we had to walk down a flight of stairs from the plane and take a bus to the terminal itself. At the end of the day I found KLM’s economy class to be like any other. The food, entertainment, or comfort weren’t actively bothersome like they were on say, Air China. But nothing was memorable in a way that say, Singapore Slings get me to consider booking Singapore Airlines over other Asian carriers. I would choose KLM in the instances that they give me the best routing, which they did this time. And if my layover in Amsterdam was long enough to hop into the city, that would be a plus that I’d consider as well.