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As you may have noticed, this site is partial to an airline review or two so, when Joanna and MJ flew with British Airways to NYC in December, I did what any sensible reviewer would do – I asked for lots of photos and a run down of what the flight was like. What follows next isn’t so much a traditional review of British Airways as an account of what Joanna found a regular BA World Traveller trip was like (with editing and interjections from me):
I’m sure Ziggy would like me to start with some sort of disclaimer: I can confirm that his last words to me as I headed towards the security line at Heathrow were something like “Have a great trip, love you lots. And please take loads of photos of everything on the plane…”
I can only apologize in advance for the lack of photos and the poor quality of the ones I did take. Eventually. When I suddenly remembered. I’m sure you’ll notice a certain air of ‘Oh cr*p!’ in them (Z: I don’t think they’ll want to see your picture of a half-eaten meal!)
I was taking a trip with my 11-year-old daughter, MJ., to spend Christmas with her father, who lives in NYC. We flew on British Airways flight 185 (Z: a Boeing 777) from Heathrow to Newark on Sunday December 20. My ticket was an award ticket (Z: which I had nothing to do with so don’t send me emails asking why Joanna wasn’t up front!), hers was paid for by my ex-husband’s company. We were on separate reservations, but the bookings were linked.
Because our tickets had been booked separately and despite the fact our reservations were linked, I couldn’t check B. in online in advance, so all I did before leaving home was log in to my booking and just check all was good. It was. I had an aisle seat, my favorite.
Ziggy drove us to the airport and, because he is a true gentleman, parked up and came into the terminal with us. The line for check in/bag drop wasn’t long, so we were dealt with quickly, by a desk agent who was already full of Christmas cheer (Z: Just to be clear, the agent was just in a good mood…not drunk). We got our boarding passes and went off to security, me blithely ignoring Ziggy’s last words to me…take..loads..of…photos…..The second of two errors I made at this point – more on my first oversight in a bit.
Fast Track Security at Heathrow T5….on a quiet day
Now, Heathrow airport, Terminal 5, on the Sunday before Christmas is crazy. I normally travel with Ziggy and he comes complete with various airline statuses and corresponding lounge access. I cannot recall the last time I flew out of an airport without having access to a lounge. If that sounds spoilt, it probably is, but don’t worry, I got my reality check big time on this trip.
B. and I did some shopping, buying supplies for the journey and a Christmas present for her father and then we decided not to battle the line for Starbucks by the A Gates (I’m pretty sure some of the people waiting for coffee are still there!) and we got on the transit train to the C Gates, which is where our flight was due to leave from. We had been warned by the desk agent that there wasn’t much at the C Gates, but we took the risk and found a very empty Starbucks right by C56, where we passed the rest of our wait before boarding.
It was bizarrely liberating not to have priority access onto the plane, so B. and I hung back until the last moment and approached the gate.
Remember I said I made two errors before heading through security? The first one was not checking my boarding pass when the desk agent handed it over. I’m normally fastidious about things like that, but for whatever reason, I didn’t notice that my seat had changed from the one I had been allotted the day before.
At some point during the night MJ and I had gone from having the aisle seat and the middle seat to the middle seat and the window seat. I was now in 27B. In the dreaded middle seat. I could have taken the window seat but, as anyone traveling with a child will tell you, if you’re going to be blocked in from the aisle anyway you may as well sit the child where they’re going to get least disturbed.
It really isn’t a massive deal, but I was a bit annoyed. I have the physique of Bambi and my limbs take up way more room than most people’s; plus I’m a fidget and like to be able to stand up and get out of my seat very regularly. I have no idea how at the last minute someone else got the seat that had been mine (Z: there was no aircraft swap so I’m not too sure how this happened either). Anyhow, I didn’t make a fuss – First World problems, and all that.
British Airways 777 World Traveller Cabin – Image Caribb via Flickr
The plane was immaculately clean and I have never experienced that before on a flight. Normally I very tentatively reach my hand into the seat pocket in front of me, wipe down everything with antiseptic wipes and vow to douse myself in disinfectant the moment I get off the plane. No need for any of that this time – it was noticeably well-detailed like it had been valeted. (Z: this is nothing short of amazing! Are BA finally learning from the bad press they received earlier in the year?)
The seats were wide enough, not too hard and the cabin crew were just the right amount of friendly, not over familiar, not snooty. (Z: The seats were almost certainly 17.5″ wide so you need to bear in mind that, as Joanna is not a person of size, what she finds “wide enough” may well not be the case for the rest of us)
I unpacked the things I would need for the journey and stowed my bag in the overhead locker, realizing that I wouldn’t be able to hop up and down like I was on a pogo stick to get things out.
Everything was going just fine. Until I put my Beats headphones, my Kindle, my phone and a magazine into the seat pocket and found I couldn’t fit my legs in any more.
I wasn’t the only person having this difficulty. The guy next to me, who had, in my eyes, stealth-stolen my seat, was easily over 6’2” and couldn’t sit down without his knees ramming into the back of the seat in front of him. He did the best he could and I started to feel less hostile towards him, given that he was clearly extremely uncomfortable.
We took off on time, and once we reached altitude, that’s when the trouble started. The passenger in 26C, the exit row, in front of my long-legged neighbor, reclined his seat, only to find that he couldn’t, as it was blocked by a pair of knees. Ten minutes of arguing transpired, during which time I witnessed a middle-aged balding New Yorker have what can only be described as a toddler meltdown. He sat in his exit row seat and every few seconds thudded his weight back against his seat, so that my neighbor’s knees were repeatedly smashed into. It was utterly ridiculous.
Now, I’m a teacher and used to dealing with misbehaving children, so I’m afraid I intervened and told the guy in the row in front to cut it out. The cabin crew had, by this time, noticed a slight disturbance and came over. They instantly started berating the young guy next to me and telling him he had to move his knees (Z: where to?!), as it was the right of every passenger to be able to recline their seat. I have an inability to stand aside and witness injustice, so I butt in again and explained to the cabin crew that it was, in fact, the older guy who should know better, who was behaving like a child. He then got reprimanded by the cabin crew and I got a very gracious thank you from both the crew and my neighbor.
At this point, as if right on cue to provide a much-needed diversion from the aggravation, the food arrived. Now, I generally don’t bother much with the food on planes, I take the tray and play around with it a bit, but don’t each much. This time, however, I ate most of it. It was seriously good. There was a choice of chicken casserole or pasta with tomato (Z: a photo would have been nice!).
I always go for the most vegetarian option available (I’m not vegetarian, but it’s less easy to mess up pasta than some ropey chicken). There was cheese and biscuits….
…..a really good chocolate mousse (the majority of which I lost to my daughter)…..
….and a weird looking starter, which I didn’t touch, so can’t in all honestly tell you what it was, except it looked like a vaguely green potato salad with a couple of shrimp on top. Who knows?
The rest of the 7 hour 20 minute journey passed without event.
I got stuck into the entertainment on board, which included complete box sets of TV shows, which really impressed me. Normally, you get to watch three or four randomly chosen episodes of a season of, say ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and then you have to move onto something else.
I solidly watched the first five episodes of the first season of ‘The Affair’, a program about which my work colleagues raved when it was first shown, but which I never made the opportunity to catch up on.
My daughter was happy with what she was offered – lots of appropriate movies and shows. Besides, she was still reveling in the fact she was as far forward as row 27 – she normally travels as an Unaccompanied Minor (UM) when she heads Stateside in her hiatuses from school and that means being stuck in the rear-most row by the galley and the lavatories, with no real seat reclining option. It does come, though, with other UMs, who are built-in new friends with different Apps on their iPads to hers. I was a positively dull traveling companion compared to that. And she gets to skip the immigration lines on arrival when she’s on her own. I was really putting the dampers on her independence. The least I could do was offer her my chocolate mousse!
The screen was an OK size, but it was pretty hard to focus on something that close to your face. Like I said, the seat-reclining issue makes it virtually impossible to move your legs, or even fit them into the space available. It’s a predictable domino-effect as soon as one person reclines, everyone else simply has to, or they are in danger of eating the headrest of the seat in front as part of their lunch. Plus, you are forced to put things into the seat pocket in front of you, as there is absolutely no other storage option. This makes the space available even more limited.
British Airways haven’t really thought that one through (Z: unfortunately neither have most other airlines). There was no way I’d have been able to rest my MacBook Air on the fold out table in front of me and still be able to type. There wasn’t enough room for my arms to be in that position.
We landed 30 minutes early, didn’t have to wait for a gate and immigration wasn’t too brutal. Whilst I waited in line, I looked gleefully at the Global Entry booths. Spending Christmas with my daughter and ex-husband wasn’t the only reason I was doing this trip – I had an appointment for the final interview to be accepted into the Global Entry program. Ziggy has a US passport and really does get into a huff about having to wait for me to be processed with hundreds of other non-US passengers, so I had applied for Global Entry (Z: a huff?! I have the patience of a saint!). Let’s just say I got it and I’ll fill you in about the process and my interview experience soon.
Featured image courtesy of Dean Morley via Flickr
