CX 947 Xian - Hong Kong
18 Oct 2025
Economy Class

I redeemed 9000 Asia Miles for this one-way flight after over a week exploring Silk Road sights in Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, and Gansu. Compared to a similar redemption in 2012, which costed 20,000 miles roundtrip, it has gotten slightly cheaper although back then, I don't think a one-way redemption would cost half the miles of a roundtrip.

Online check-in was a breeze and I was able to secure a window seat at the front of the cabin ahead of the wing. It's an A330 once again - the same aircraft type as my inbound.

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Xian's Terminal 5 just opened in February 2025 and I decided to get there a lot earlier than usual to explore the facility. It's fairly easy to reach as Line 14 has a stop there and the journey from the North railway station takes about 30 minutes only with a very affordable fare of 7 yuan.

During Saturday at lunch time, trains came every 10 minutes, with Terminal 5 being the 2nd last stop - the terminus is Terminals 1,2,3.

Upon reaching the station, I head upstairs for the exit, after which it is a long walk indoors to a holding pen, where we were healded in with a staff swabbing us to do an explosives test. Once the result is out and we're clean, we are then let through to go up to the departures area.

Arriving at the departures floor, I was amazed at the high ceilings, spacious design, and a re-created temple with high-tech effects above it.

Domestic and international departures have segregated entrances to security and it was fairly quiet at the Cathay counters with barely a wait for a counter to drop off my bag. The staff was friendly and asked whether I had any portable battery packs, a sign of the new times after a few in-flight fires in this part of the world. She then asked that I wait to make sure the bag passes initial scanning before I leave, with the big scanner just behind her.

All this was done fairly quickly and I then roamed around the terminal to check out the features. I came across the international departures board and noted it's quiet around here! The first 2 flights on the board are to Belarus and Russia.

I headed upstairs to check out the huge temple, which reminded me of Haneda Airport, which had re-created something similar as well. This one had only a few shops but I noticed a stream of people coming out of a building that got my attention.

Coming closer, it's actually a museum! Similar to a lot of museums in China, you first need to do real-name registration with your Wechat. However, for anyone without a national ID, and that means all Hong Kongers and foreign tourists, this does not work, so staff took a photo of my identification and let me in manually.

When Xian's airport was expanded during COVID, archaeologists found over 6800 ancient cultural sites and over 22,000 relics. Some of what they found are on display here at this airport museum. They all seem to date from the Tang Dynasty, which was a huge golden age where trade along the Silk Road flourished, with Xian being the imperial capital. Coupled with a lot of technological effects, the small display was very impressive.

Satisfied, I headed across the aisle where there was another building with an exhibition. Again, staff took a photo of my identification and then let me in manually. This one only had 1 item on show though.

Leaving as a happy customer, I've so far been quite impressed with the museum offering right in the terminal building. It wasn't crowded here either and with such an immensely large space, I was enjoying this departure experience.

Finally, there was a tea exhibition that I glanced over as well.

I then headed back downstairs to enter security. But before going in, I noticed a huge traditional Chinese painting along the wall but there are modern twists such as the airport and high-speed trains on it.

With us being the only departure for the hour, security was a breeze, but staff were on the look out for power banks and rechargeable batteries. The scanners picked up my drone battery pack and staff examined it in detail.

There were a few other people ahead of me for immigration, but it wasn't long to exit into air-side. With so few international flights, there was only 1 food cart and restaurant open here. Most of the shop spaces were boarded up and not yet open.

It's a very long walk through the terminal pier towards my gate. By now, they've called boarding.

Boarding was complete at 3:50pm and we pushed back 7 minutes later ahead of schedule for the 2.5 hour flight, taking off into the cloudy sky at 3:59pm.

I picked the pork with rice for dinner, which was accompanied by metal cutlery wrapped in a paper bag and a mango sorbet ice-cream. However, it consisted of extremely fatty pork so I had to tread around the unhealthy pieces and ended up still hungry. We are a bit spoiled in this part of the world where a hot meal is expected even on these types of short-haul flights.

We passed above Macau and looped around in the ocean before coming in for landing.

We touched down at 6:40pm for an early arrival.

Hong Kong's airport is quite a breeze to use for arrivals and I was out to the baggage belt quickly. My bag did take quite some time to arrive though but it was overall a good flight experience. Xian doesn't get that many flights to Hong Kong and this was the closest port on Cathay's network that can get me to Ningxia. Even China Eastern doesn't fly daily so there will be days when Cathay runs the only lone flight.