United Airlines Business Class B737 Washington to St Thomas

United Airlines 1443
Washington-Dulles (IAD) – St Thomas (STT)
Boeing 737-700
03 May 2014

I landed in Washington DC on time and we made it to the gate ten minutes before the scheduled landing time. I headed to the United Club in the Midfield terminal where I could get some work done and read my emails.

After spending roughly an hour there, I went over to the departure gate and to my surprise, they were already boarding (which wasn’t supposed to happen for another ten minutes).

The Boeing 737 was served by an ex-Continental crew as I heard them talking something about how ‘back in the day’… Anyway, they were friendly and offered me a pre-departure beverage as soon as I boarded.

The legroom was standard for United’s domestic First Class. Now because this is an international (not really – USVI are a territory of the US) flight, United calls it Business Class, even though they would call the same cabin First on domestic flights. I really don’t get the naming scheme they are going with.

Once airborne, the main FA took breakfast orders. Apparently she had two choices, but by the time she made it to my seat all she could offer me was cereal with a fruit salad.

After breakfast, I continued to gaze outside at the US coastline and eventually we started to hop over the islands and made it to St Thomas in about 4 hours.

The landing views were beautiful:

I think we got even closer to the water than in San Francisco, and I mean really close. The runway finally appeared and as soon as it did the wheels touched the ground.

We deplaned using air stairs as the airport in St Thomas is very, very awful. Not just because of the design, but poor customer service as well.

It was about 30 degrees C and at this point I was a little tired. It turned out that my parent’s flight (which was supposed to land 5 minutes before mine), was 30 minutes delAAyed. I waited in the hot-as-#$%& baggage claim area where EVERYONE was NOT wearing shirts, I think I was the only one and got strange glares from some of the people…