- Onboard the Aeroflot A321, heading to Bishkek,
the capital city of Kyrgyzstan.
Well, good morning from Moscow,
Sheremetyevo International Airport,
home of course, to Aeroflot.
And it's Aeroflot that we're flying on today,
because today
we're heading to Kyrgyzstan.
Yes, creepy here.
This is actually Terminal E
where the transit hotel is,
and Terminal E has been closed for over a year now.
It's just completely deserted, very eerie.
First stop today then was to try and find
the Aeroflot lounge to grab some coffee before the flight.
The lounge here is pretty comfy
with a limited selection of food and drink.
So,
found time to pop in to the aptly named
Moscow Lounge, here at Sheremetyevo.
It's the lounge that Aeroflot use.
Here, it's about a five-minute walk to the gate,
about half an hour till my flight goes sort of calling.
Had a little bit of breakfast.
Check out the lounge very soon.
Very Soviet looking breakfast.
Some pink sausages and omelet, apparently.
I didn't have long to eat my breakfast
before it was time to head down to the gate.
All right then, time to head
to the gate, let's go.
As I got to the gate I soon figured out
it was going to be a pretty busy flight today.
They were already boarding business class,
so I didn't waste any time in getting on board.
Thank you.
Ah, thank you.
A321
Wasn't sure which airbus it was for a minute.
And it's an Airbus A321,
it's about a four-hour flight down to Bishkek, the capital
of Kyrgyzstan.
And it's quite a nice aircraft.
It's in a two-two configuration,
there's four rows of
business class on the Aeroflot A321.
Surprisingly for a narrow-body flight.
I mean a ticket.
She looks like the same one I got on my 777 flight,
which I'll put a link sort of
up there
to that video, if you've not seen that already.
A pair of slippers,
not sure how much use they're gonna be
on a four-hour flight, but nevermind.
That's orange juice.
It's got the day started, it's an 8:00 AM flight
from Moscow down to Bishkek.
Looking forward to it, should be a good ride.
- [Flight Attendant] Before flight.
You are kindly requested to place items like your luggage
in the overhead bins.
- Our route today then took us east out of Moscow
towards Nizhny Novgorod.
From there, we turned southeast across Kazakhstan,
descending down into the city of Bishkek.
Flight time today was four hours and seven minutes,
cruising at 33,000 feet.
So then airborne from Moscow onboard
the Aeroflot A321 heading to
Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan.
The Aeroflot A321, is pretty comfy up here
in the business class.
The seats are in this
two-two config, which I really like about the
CIS carriers on Aeroflot and the like.
And you find that a lot with other airlines,
Belavia have a similar sort of arrangement whereby
business class actually has proper business class seats,
instead of this Euro business configuration
you get a lot of the time where it's just three seats
and a middle seat blocked off.
So that's one thing that's really good about Aeroflot
on the A320 Series.
The seats themselves, well they're pretty comfy.
Plenty of legroom, really.
I mean, I'm,
as I said before, I'm 6-foot 4 inches
and I've got quite a lot of leg room down here.
There's a little foot rest thing going on.
No seat-back entertainment,
but they have given me this
iPad type thing.
Might be a,
it's not an iPad, actually.
It looks like some of the sort of generic tablet device
to watch the in-flight entertainment on,
which we will be looking at in a little while.
The seat itself, well, down here,
you've got the settings here for the seat,
for reclining and stuff, old school
hydraulic sort of system,
you press the button and it sort of like
lays back.
Tray table's down here.
And then down the front of the seat,
no not really much down there either, to be honest.
But it's pretty good. It's not bad.
It's a three-hour, three and a half hour flight
down to Bishkek.
So, should be good.
Looking forward to the meal service,
having some breakfast.
We've got the menu here.
I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to have, but we'll see
what is available when they come round.
Yeah, so far so good.
The breakfast selection was pretty good on today's flight.
I decided to go for the cheese platter today,
followed by the omelet.
In-flight entertainment on Aeroflot's narrow-body fleet
consists of this tablet
That's preloaded with movies.
The selection wasn't amazing,
but I was able to find a Russian film with English captions.
Fairly soon my breakfast turned up,
which I have to say was presented beautifully.
So breakfast is served
and we've got a cheese platter today for the starter,
and then I've ordered an omelet for my main course,
as well as, of course, black coffee,
well needed at this time of the morning.
And an orange juice as well.
All right, main course time.
Omelet.
Let's see what it's like.
I do like the cutlery you get on Aeroflot, by the way.
Very cool.
It's actually cooked really nicely as well.
Very nice.
So, overhead, Kazakhstan,
home, of course, to SCAT Airlines, the famous SCAT airlines.
If you've not see that video, by the way,
I'll pop a link up here.
It was a very funny trip.
But yes, we've just passed Aktobe, in Kazakhstan.
It's bringing back memories of my
trip over to Kazakhstan a couple of years back,
with SCAT.
I've got about,
I think about
an hour now, until we land down in Bishkek.
Bishkek's right on the border of
Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
In fact, the final approach path,
you actually start your final approach over Kazakhstan
and land at the airport,
which is just inside the Kyrgyz border.
So that should be fun.
I'm looking forward to seeing that approach
down into Bishkek.
It's very brown, very deserty
out over Kazakhstan.
Epic view there, look at that sky.
It's just incredible, isn't it?
The skies over central Asia, I love it.
Just like my previous Aeroflot flight,
the crew came around with a gift of tea and chocolates
before we started our descent.
We started our approach over Kazakhstan.
You cross the border into Kyrgyzstan
just three miles from touchdown on final approach.
My flight down to Bishkek today
works out at 929 pounds, or around about 1200 US dollars.
This works out to a cost per mile of 50 Pence.
Once again, I found Aeroflot pretty expensive
for this flight,
but the service was, on the whole, pretty decent.
Don't forget to check out my previous video
on the Aeroflot 777,
to see the difference between the A321
and Aeroflot's wide-body service.
As always, I'd like to say a big thanks to my Patreons.
You can join them at the link on the screen now
for access to my WhatsApp group,
live weekly Zoom calls with me, and much more.
I was through the airport
and it was time to say hello, once again,
to my arch nemesis,
the foreign taxi driver.
So what, I don't, I have,
that's it, so ,
so yes, or no?
- 2000 is okay, I carry, no problem.
- [Host] 2000?
- Yes, .
- [Host] 1500.
1500.
- Yeah, sounds good, okay, cheap price, money, money.
- [Host] 2000 then? It's 2000.
I have no other choice, so .
No other taxis, so.
Cheap price, money, money, to him, maybe,
but the going rate for a licensed car is 200 Som
or around 2 pounds.
Two-thousand Som is around 20 quid.
Still, at this price, at least I was hoping
to travel in style.
It's taxi, ah?
- Yes, yes, yes.
- Ah, well, if nothing else,
I was about to have an experience.
So, Kyrgyzstan, good?
- Good, good, good place.
Good place, tourist, too much.
- Yes, good.
And hot, very hot.
- Yes, yes.
- Warm, yes.
Warmer than England.
- You're tourist, business?
- YouTube. Do you know YouTube?
- Yes, yes.
- So, I make videos for YouTube, so.
- Oh, YouTube?
- Yeah.
- Yeah! YouTube!
How are you?
- Manas airport is around a 40-minute drive
to the center of Bishkek.
It's an absolutely beautiful city
that I'm looking forward to exploring
over the next few days.
Welcome then to Bishkek,
the capital city of Kyrgyzstan.
And that's where
I'm going to be now for the next few days,
trying out a few of the local airlines here
in this part of the world.
What an absolutely amazing city this is,
look at that view out of my window.
The mountains over in the background there,
city of Bishkek down there,
fountain down in the car park.
It's actually
quite a nice hotel, actually, this one.
I quite like this one.
I really hope you enjoyed this video.
Let me know what you thought to Aeroflot
down in the comments below,
and whether you thought the A321 was as good as I thought.
I thought it was pretty good actually,
for a three-hour flight.
But let me know down in the comments.
In the meantime, as always,
thank you so much for watching, take care,
and I'll see you on the next one.
Bye for now.