This is a Trip Report from the Economy cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
Seat
Cabin Crew
Flight today was on an A340-600 / G-VFOX, and I was allocated my correct seat without any problem. Again loads on this flight looked very good indeed.
We left from gate 54, where the jet bridge went to the front door (in front of Upper Class section). This meant all pax had to walk through Upper Class to get to PE/Y seats!
As I passed the bar, one of the stewardesses said she was going to make a 'run for it' trying to get champers to the Upper Class pax [:D]
This must have been diffficult for the staff to keep those folks happy pre take-off!
any way, settled in my seat okay, with a nice view of wing (it was in fact the last window seat available when I booked)
View from seat at gate 54, EWR
[img]http://virginflyer.com/photos/1618.jpg[/img]
push back was spot on time, but we had a good 20 minute hold, letting lots of Continental jets pass us to the runway, before we were permitted to take off. There were excellent views of New York on take off (no pics though - sorry!)
Seat pitch was reasonable in seat 41A (I'm 5'10') and again had one of those IFE boxes taking some leg room
[n]
Y Class Leg room
[img]http://virginflyer.com/photos/1620.jpg[/img]
Food was catered by a company called 'flying food' at EWR, and this was my first daylight flight east bound, so was interested to see what we got.
Had a choice of vegetarian omlette or english breakfast (no third option). I Opted for the English, which was dreadful.
one small suasage, one flimsy/small rasher of bacon, one teaspoon of chopped tomato, another tea spoon of mushrooms, and 6 very thin slices of potato (which had abosrbed all the tomato/mushroom juices, so were very sloppy.
All this took less than half the volume of the standard Y class food container - a bit of a joke really.
I'd suggest VS have a look at the catering on VS18 - it was very sub-standard, even for Y class (whilst outbound on VS17 was very good).
later in the flight we were offered a pre landing snack, which was a choice of cheese or turkey wraps. I went for the Turkey which was not bad, but it could not raise the overall score on the food from 'very bad'.
Cloud cover again blocks my views of greenland on this flight - I always try and get a seat to see the icebergs etc, but alas no joy this time.
Window view in flight
[img]http://virginflyer.com/photos/1619.jpg[/img]
An unusual announcement was (jokingly) made at this point that someone had left a muffin on the bar, and could they please reclaim it!
Again V:Port was superb - no probelms/issues at all, but we did have the Sky News [V], and it was over an hour in flight before V:Port was switched on (which crew did apologise for).
Considering this is only a 6 hour flight, and IFE was switched off an hour before landing, it means that V:Port was only on for 2/3rds of the flight - they really should address this. Downmarked from Excellent for these two reasons.
Watched Stoned, which was a bit of music history I was completely ignorant of - thought it was an excellent film
A little pic of the V:Port menu screen
[img]http://virginflyer.com/photos/1621.jpg[/img]
Before landing, an announcment came that the muffin was still on the bar, and it was going to be binned if not claimed immediately [:D] this got a lot of laughs around the cabin, and the steward himself was nearly laughing announcing it!
Crew did excellent work on this short 6 hour flight - with food service, coffee tea service, full bar service, ice cream service, pre landing snack service, another tea coffee service and the duty free service - they were really rushed off their feet - and did a very good job - top marks to them.
Landing was going to be early, but a ten minute hold over Ockham put paid to that, this was then followed on landing by a 30 minute hold for our gate to be vacated by another VS A340-600[V] so we ended up being late.
To VS credit there were some pax connecting on the Delhi service, and they were ushered through and looked after to ensure they made the connection.
Overall a reasonalble flight, only let down by food quality and hold time for gate.
Next VS flights are back up front in UCS to Sydney - boy I'm looking forward to that one!
Hope you enjoyed.
Rich.
