From Private to Professional Pilot: Flight Report: US Airways (Air Wisconsin) CRJ-200 RIC to PHL

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Flight Report: US Airways (Air Wisconsin) CRJ-200 RIC to PHL

The day started early for us, waking up at 3:30 am for our 5:50am flight from Richmond International Airport (RIC) to Philadelphia International Airport (PHL). We were headed down to New Orleans MSY for a family reunion in Gulf Shores, AL. In addition to being my shortest commercial flight to date, at only 34 minutes, this was the first time I had ever flown into PHL! I ended up liking the Philadelphia airport a lot more than most of the airports I've been to; it was clean and had nice restaurants and story. It also has a Washington-Dulles style bus transfer system to move people between terminals.

US Airways (Air Wisconsin) Flight 3926 Information

Flight: Richmond International Airport (RIC) to Philadelphia International Airport (PHL)
Flight Time: 34 minutes
Aircraft: US Airways (Air Wisconsin) CRJ-200 N413AW
Seat: 11F (window)

After checking the night before, I noticed that the latter half of the aircraft was to be empty except for us, or so we thought. Due to storms the day before, people had their flights cancelled and were re-booked to our early-morning flight.

The US Airways CRJ-200 is honestly one of my least favorite planes to fly on. Honestly, I've never had a "bad" experience on any plane because I love to fly so much! But still... they are definitely aging both on the interior and exterior.

US Airways (Air Wisconsin) CRJ-200 N413AW

Our plane at the gate in RIC

Here is the video of our takeoff from RIC which can be found on my youtube channel: MartinsAviation1

Here is an image from flightaware of route from RIC to PHL. Below is a graph showing our altitude and speed throughout the flight: as you can see, the flight stayed at a low altitude of 13,100ft:

The flight went well overall. It was bumpy because of a front moving through the area, which made the scenery that much more interesting! There were at least 5 different layers of clouds at different altitudes. We didn't get to see too much of the sunrise, but at least we had the clouds. At our very low maximum altitude of 13,100ft, we were flying through, not over, the weather.

Here are three photos of our flight through clouds en-route to PHL:

As I said earlier, the interior of these old CRJ's is definitely aging and not all that comfortable. Here is a photo of the last few rows (from airliners.net):

The 34 minute long flight went by very quickly. Landing into PHL was surprisingly scenic. I had no idea that the over-river approach was as nice as it was. Landing into PHL, you could see downtown Philadelphia in the distance not too far away.

As you can see from our landing video, the river approach was pretty nice! In addition, one can see the wingtip vortices being produced by the CRJ's wing: