Since the flight is due to leave at 01:05, left the office at 7:00pm, had dinner with some colleagues in a Turkish restaurant - pretty good actually - back to the hotel to collect bag & change clothe, then off to the airport.
The BA web site was showing an expected delay of 45 minutes, but we ended up leaving on time.
Arrived at the terminal, and bags x-rayed before the check in desks. Dropped off the bag, and then through passport control and through the duty free shop, and off to the shared lounge at the international terminal which was adequate; some snacks & soft drinks to pass the time.
My colleague headed off for his LH flight to FRA, and I then made my way to the gate - where it seemed that almost everyone was in the priority line! Eventually started boarding, and made my way to 11D; another aisle seat.
Another full flight (apparently today's BA flight is on a Short Haul 767, and flyertalk shows a few people less than happy about it - getting a CE seat instead of a CW bed, and it also now running over 5 hours late! Ouch!)
Smooth take off just a few minutes late, and the menu's are delivered; the early "snack" of a couple of sandwiches comes round and orders for breakfast taken.
Set up the bed and try to sleep - fortunately the people "inside" me didn't climb over me at all. The bed is weird, the way it narrows towards the bottom, but I get about 3 hours or so sleep on this 7 hour flight, and doze a bit until the lights come on about 1.5 hours out & breakfast comes round. Don't eat much as my plan is to use the arrivals lounge in T5.
Land on time, and taxi to T5C and wait a few minutes for the bridge to be connected, which it does at the second door and surprises the crew....
Quickly off; wait almost 10 minutes for a shuttle, and then quickly through the self service immigration kiosks. Bags arrived a few minutes later, and out to T5.
Overall a reasonable flight; I think the UC beds are better, but we will be on an A330 UCDS in Sep 2015 so I can do a comparison there.
Service quite slow, and again I didn't enjoy having food & drink thrust under my nose to the central seat, and the partition drops with quite a thump!
The BA T5 arrivals lounge is quite nice; breakfast is good and the (cooked to order) fried eggs made a pleasant change from the watery scrambled egg usually available). A pleasant way to wake up and get ready for some action.
So off to the office around 7:00, and picked up the car for the drive home down the M3. Felt OK until I started to struggle around 2:00pm. In contrast to my Havana overnighter where I slept better and didn't have any jet lag issues at all...
