"A Great Way To Fly"

Wednesday morning meant it was finally time to get down to business and the entire Asia tour group assembled at 8:30am for a briefing (breakfast was included and since it was nearing lunch time for my Central time internal clock I was thankful for that). After a thorough meeting we were all ready, massive amounts of luggage in tow, to descend on LAX and spend a little business lounge time before boarding our Singapore Airlines flight bound for Tokyo. Turns out there was a snag, traffic into LAX was at a virtual standstill around noon and on the way there we noticed a lot of helicopters hovering in the sky above the airport. Apparently there had been a bomb threat (yep, and based on my Google search for an article on this, not something rare at poor LAX) that morning at Terminal 1 and the entire airport was shut down for some undetermined amount of time. Luckily, by the time we arrived everything was reopened for business and we were dropped off, checked-in, took off my shoes for the last time for 3 weeks through security (note to U.S. TSA: the removing of shoes is unnecessesary anywhere else in the world) and arrived at the Star Alliance Business Lounge for some lunch, work, and R&R.

The title of this blog post is the official slogan of Singapore Airlines, "A Great Way To Fly," and that is one of the most accurate statements ever, period. Singapore claims to be the world's most awarded airline and the recent Zagat survey of Americans it placed first for both Business and Economy cabins, and it topped the poll for comfort, service, and food. As we got settled into our seats the Captain informed us it would be a "short" flight of 10 hours and 10 minutes to Tokyo from Los Angeles. Now, 10 hours and change may sound like a long flight, but when you have seats on Singapore Airlines you are actually ok with a longer flightplan.

Singapore Airlines has set the bar extremely high for trans-Pacific business class travelers: 600 entertainment options (we're talking more movies than you could watch in 10 hours - I finally saw "21" and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it, 80 TV shows - from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" to "Scrubs" and "Rome", Nintendo, etc.); complimentary Bose-esque noise-cancelling headphones; restaurant-quality food (and service), or as they call it, "gastric indulgences" with real silverware:

and best of all...what they call Spacebed seats. These seats, if you want to call them that, are like a recliner and then also convert to an angled flat bed. This may all sound very nice and pampered, but the reason we fly business class is because we are on a business trip and this level of comfort and service allows us to hit the ground running and experience considerably less jetlag when we get to Tokyo. So, between the movies, the reading/stretching out, and the meal service (three-course meals, with each course served individually so it was as if the food just kept coming and coming)...we were in Tokyo before we knew it.

On the return trip from Hong Kong to San Francisco we have the unique opportunity to fly on the new Airbus A380, the world's largest airplane. This will be a documented experience in the second to last blog post, but in the meantime for a preview of what that plane will look like take a look at this "space in a new light" video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBGhjEwcG3w

We left Los Angeles on Wednesday afternoon and 10 hours later landed in Tokyo as the sun was setting on Thursday afternoon. So, for the next three weeks my blog posts will be coming to you from the future. I type this on Friday evening in Japan and it is only Friday morning in the States. But, I digress. After 10 hours we arrived comfortable, but a little tired in Japan and I made it through customs and then took this picture (and was promptly instructed by an official badge-yielding Japanese man not to take anymore pictures):


Tokyo Narita International is located about an hour outside of the city (a troublesome little fact too many Asian cities have in common), so we boarded a bus and made our way to the hotel, where I collapsed in my little Japanese business hotel bed after being awake for about 20 hours.