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Review: Air Canada Business Class, Airbus 320, Los Angeles – Vancouver

I arrived to the gate at the boarding time on the card but there wasn’t much happening. As in the case with most LAX gates, most of the lines were into the concourse area. Being Terminal 6, most of the flights today were Alaska Airlines flights. They likely have a much greater presence here now thanks to their acquisition of Virgin America and all their related routes.

Most of the traveler’s today didn’t appear to know or understand the boarding zone concept for Air Canada so everyone was scattered all over the place. I’m not really sure why since it’s used on airlines in the US such as American and United. For some reason, there were a ton of service dogs on this flight – at least 3, Don’t know whether that was the LA crowd or just my bad luck.

Air Canada
AC 573 – Business Class (I)
LAX – YVR (Los Angeles Terminal 6 – Vancouver International Airport)
Dec 18, 2018
12:30 PM – 3:29 PM
Booked: Airbus 319
Flown: Airbus 320-200

On Board:

“Air Canada Business Class offered a reasonable narrow body trans-border flight experience with interesting but generally plain food and beverage options”

On board, it’s the usual barca lounger seats on the North American flights, which is set up in a 2-2 configuration. It was a full load on the flight today. My seat mate was a “celebutante” and we didn’t have much interaction thanks to my weird photo taking hobby.

The pre-departure beverage was a 330 ml bottle of Naya water dropped off at the seat. No other type of beverage was offered.

We got underway with a long taxi from the south side of the airport over to the north runways. As we taxied past the north runways, saw a Lufthansa A380 and a Korean A380 land. It’s so cool that you can see great airplanes at LAX, amid all the other traffic.

Our departure path today took us out over the Los Angeles coast line, which is always scenic. I think I have seen this more from the air than I have visited on the ground. We also passed by the coastal islands near Camarillo.

Food and Beverage:

Air Canada is still offering printed menus on its transborder services. Fortunately, today they remembered to load them. Menus were passed out which was a nice touch.

I had a pre-lunch drink of gin and tonic with a heated nuts service.

Although we had printed menus, in true Air Canada form, the lunch didn’t match the catering. Today’s main was a form of butter chicken. I ended up having it anyway. My celebutante seat partner passed on the meal as she had an apparent gluten issue and just stuck with water.

It was an uneventful flight and I spent most of it nodding off thanks to the Europe to Americas jet lag. We eventually came into rainy Vancouver where the clouds were out as it was December.

After landing, we taxied across the apron to our US concourse gate near the US CBP Pre-Clearance facility. There was a beautiful Air New Zealand B777 parked at the international terminal as we rolled past.

In Summary:

All in all a short and reasonable trip on Air Canada. They don’t have to try to hard to compete on this route and it shows.

Thanks for following along on another great First Class trip!