Korean Air
 

I just booked tickets with FF miles on Korean Air but know nothing about them. We'll be flying from BKK-Seoul-Atlanta next Dec. Just wondering how anyone feels about this airline since it is a fairly long flight and we are in coach. Thanks for your input.

Oh, thats a long flight.

Several years ago I flew Seoul-JFK and it was 15 hours.

They put a drink cart at the rear of the plane and it was like hanging out in a bar - pour your own drink. We got tipsy, sobered up, then got tipsy again.

The food was very Korean(duh), so if you are not a fan of garlic pickles you might want to bring your own snacks.

There were also 5 Korean babies on that flight coming to the US for adoption. We all had a chance to hold them. No one can hold a baby for 15 hours straight.

Hopefully someone will write with more recent experience.

We flew on Korean Air from LAX to BKK in December 1999. We were in coach and I found it to be more comfortable (i.e. spacious) than any flight on any US airline. I did not learn until after we reached that Korean Air had one of the worst safety records of any airline. I don't know if this is still true. At the time, they were prohibited from landing or taking off at any US airport after dark!

Korean Air do have a bad safty record. Many of their pilots are ex-airforce and can be cowboys. You like the steepest turns, the closest approaches, then great. I read of an instance in an Air Saftey book where a Korean Airlines plane once dropped 20,000 ft after it somehow slipped out of Autopilot in turbulence. The pilots recovered the plane and landed safely at LAX - but curiously the wings were buckled slightly upwards and backwwards. Examination of the black box revealed the airliner had rolled 360 degrees during the plunge! A miracle everyone survived!

We just flew Korean Air in coach round trip New York-Auckland, New Zealand. This involved a NY-Seoul flight (about 13 hours) and Seoul to Auckland (11 hours). I was very pleased with the flights and would fly them again with no hesitation. There was plenty of leg room; my son and my husband are about 6' and were comfortable. The flight crews are excellent, extremely attentive and constantly cleaning the cabin and the bathrooms (which is particularly important on such long flights). The food was fine, with both non-ethnic and korean choices (we really liked the korean bimbimbab). The only negative was that there are no personal video screens, at least not on the equipment we flew. Otherwise, fine.

The 20,000 foot plunge sounds like an urban legend to me. It's not listed at aviation-safety.net, which has a database of every known incident. This kind of thing gets reported, especially if there's damage to the airframe, even if there's no casualties. Certainly if you're going to poke around in the flight data recorder, which only the FAA is allowed to touch!

Korean Air did have a bad safety record in the 90s but have an excellent one since then.

I think you'll find the "plunge" incident was actually a Air China 747SP. Ironically one of the safer Asian airlines statistically.

Korean Air did at one time in the early 90's have a poor record but they had to shape up with all their standards in order to be allowed into the "Skyteam Alliance" which they have done.