NW31 LGW-DTW 28 Jan 06: NW i/c Y *2, dom F*2
Posted: 20 Feb 2006, 23:58For my sins, I have strayed from the path of purity that is the Virgin Flying Club and succumbed to the temptation of Continental OnePass. 'Join us', they hissed, 'for we will offer you miles on all those lovely cheap Virgin code-shares with CO flight numbers.' I have since learnt that OnePass is regarded as something of a joke for apparently there is very little availability of reward tickets at the 50,000 mile transAtlantic level and it is by far more usual to require a SleazyPass ticket at twice that rate. (Or, er, more than a return in Upper Class costs in Flying Club, even with the new figures.) Still, more fool me, eh?
That said, I managed to scrape over the line to Continental Silver last year by about three Frequent Flyer Inches and so I am Skyteam Elite, which sounds rather like a rejected Gerry Anderson cartoon title. It also means that I was able to take my pick online of the seats on the NW flight a couple of months in advance, even picking the bulkhead rows. Additionally, when I checked in online, it advised me that a free upgrade was available for the US domestic leg if I fancied it. Oddly enough, I did. I think these unlimited free domestic upgrades are a mutual CO-NW perk rather than being Skyteam-wide, but that'll definitely ding dang do for me.
I picked up some GNER off-peak hit-the-right-train-or-die singles to get down from MMEbrough to King's Cross, stayed overnight with friends in Zone 4 and caught a train the next day from London Bridge to LGW. Points deducted from London Bridge for selling tickets that are valid only for certain train operators but not telling you which operator is running which train until you've gone to the platform. Accordingly I paid for a cheapo Southern-only ticket, caught a more expensive but quicker Something-Else train and have been feeling about 0.5% guilty ever since. I shall pay for one of the fast ones and take a slow one on the way back to compensate.
As challenged as one-runway LGW may be, I love it like a lame duck all the same for its excellent shopping - better landside shopping than LHR any day of the week. Checkin was easy, though the LGW security guy fancied himself a bit of a hard-nut despite being ever so terribly friendly; I checked in my little suitcase and carried around my laptop case as my hand luggage. Then I discovered that the LGW branch of Clarks was closing down and bought myself a pair of shoes, as you tend to do while you're at an airport. (Don't you? Course you do.) Accordingly my shoebox became my hand luggage and my overstuffed laptop case my personal item. My laptop case is mighty fat, though I'm sure it's far from the girthiest out there. This is surely following the letter rather than the spirit of the hand luggage regulations?
Security was quick and I made it to the very furthest little radial knobble of gates half a dozen conveyor belts away through the Gatwick maze. Apparently I was one of the last passengers to board despite being close to an hour before the scheduled takeoff time. All the same, seat 10H was waiting for me as requested. Be warned that NW flies both A330s and multiple Boeing jets; judging from the NW magazine, the A330s are all-singing and all-dancing whereas the Boeings are likely to be all-minging and all-chancing. Note that when I rhapsodise about my flight below, a transatlantic flight on a NW Boeing may well be significantly less fun. Consider yourselves warned.
NW operates a two-class A330; the pointy end is seated 2-2-2, the coach section 2-4-2. Row 10 is at the very front of coach - you have a direct run from the entrance door through the galley and there you are. Columns A and J are the windows, with B and H the aisles; as is usual with emergency exit seats, the aisle seats have a great big block in front of them, presumably containing an uninflated exit slide. The aisle seats in the exit row have as much legroom as you would like. Thumbs fully aloft for the NW coach seats, with nary a complaint from my back afterwards. Definitely firmly among the best airline seats I've yet used - yes, even including VS Y. Bonus points for at-seat laptop power in Y, though evidently not enough to run two Dells in adjacent seats all the time.
The other fun aspect of being in row 10 is that you have a close eye on what the cabin staff are getting up to. One of the main staff I had to deal with was very downbeat about her job; another one - possibly a First Officer? - was in an excellent mood, this being his last day at the airline. After that flight, a career in corporate jets beckons, purportedly answering to the CEO of a certain manufacturing and mining company from a northern US state that I could mention. Apparently part of the recruitment process tested his ability to improvise catering tasty dishes from highly limited resources; you can supposedly wrap cheese and bread in foil and jam it behind a coffee-pot to produce an entirely serviceable grilled cheese sandwich.
The flight across took close to nine hours, the flight back a shade under seven. NW's A330s have personal video screens and their entertainment system is, well, really quite impressive - it seriously bears comparison to V:Port. On the downside there is quite a delay before they let you get at the good stuff, but the Skyteam advertisements and chair aerobics demo make a change from Sky News. On the downside, in both directions, the system needed two or three reboots before it would be fully up and running, each reboot taking 20 minutes, but at least there's a separate Skymap to look at on a screen at the front of each cabin, while things warm up. (Except that the skymap is replaced by a lovely Linux boot sequence at some point - no clue which distro, but I recognised the penguin - and the system even charmingly launches into a dull grey Xwindows session at one point.)
Your selection of entertainment includes something like fifty movies and something like a thousand music tracks; there are about 30 channels, each of which has typically 32 tracks, but you can access any track on any channel at any time. A very nice touch is that you can build up your own personal jukebox, pseudo-dragging individual tracks through the menu system to create your own playlist. The selection of games is pretty token, though people who enjoy playing Bejeweled on Yahoo! Games are in for a treat. I'll even pick the NW in-flight trivia over V:Port's; the game runs a bit slower (e.g. 12 seconds per question, possibly slightly longer gaps between questions) but it looks nicer and it's a lot harder to accidentally quit. It also helped that I won three games running - three more victories than I've ever had on VS, I might add - getting into #8 on the all-time top ten on the last two. In yer face, seat 18J!
In fact, there are lots of little ways in which the whole NW entertainment system was just really nicely designed - there are times when V:Port can be just slightly fiddly in terms of the function of buttons changing a little more quickly from screen to screen than you'd like, whereas the NW system seems a little more friendly, intuitive and consistent. In V:Port's favour, though, the VS selection of movies, music and games to choose between in is just far more to my British taste. There's good reason why I was writing this on the way back rather than watching movies, for instance.
Food was pretty good. The journey out offered a choice of chicken or pasta, the chicken being a healthily sized branded pot of Uncle Ben's chicken in Szechuan sauce with rice, accompanied by the single best salad I've had in the air yet - a medley of beans and a very mayonnaise-y potato salad. The presentation of the food was much less cramped than most airline boxes in Y. I famously have low standards for my airline food, but this was easily good enough. On the way back, the choice was chicken or pasta, which made me go 'Oh.' - but the chicken this time was a spicy, slightly unnaturally shaped lump with the potatoes and beans being in the hot dish rather than in the salad this time, the salad being lettuce with slices of cucumber and tomato. The desserts and snacks were unremarkable. (Translation: 'I've forgotten'.) I'm writing this on the flight on the way back and will come back and edit in something about breakfast later.
Edited to add: breakfast was a fair effort, too. Not many marks for the flavourless little disc of scrambled egg, served in a biscuit; that's biscuit by the American definition, which translates to something between 'savoury scone' and 'dumpling'. Being American, there's also a scrape of melted cheese in there. Other than that, there's a little pot of tropical fruit (papaya, my Lord! Papaya!) and a raspberry yoghurt. Given that you can get both orange juice /and/ coffee as well to drink, this is a respectable showing.
The cabin crew were a mixed bag. On the way there, there was one female FA who clearly wasn't in love with her job, declaring the selection of meals available to be 'fabulous' with a certain twang in her voice; however, on the way back, there was an *extremely* competent, pleasant and helpful FA, who went a little above and beyond the call of duty to get my laptop working. Hurrah! I also got to learn that most of the mysterious unexplained pings you hear over the PA are to inform the FAs to pick up an internal phone. I also enjoyed hearing the FAs answer the phone in the name of Hollywood personalities, only once inadvertently connecting themselves to the PA. It passes the time, clearly.
On the way back, I had booked myself into 10H again, but 10H and 10J were occupied by a couple, apparently originally seated in 11H and 11J, who had decided to swap with the previous 10J occupant, plus me in absentia. I didn't make a fuss about it - nobody likes a whinger, and if I'm going to whinge then there are far more deserving targets, mentioning no Atlanta airport shuttle companies - and so I have been able to try out one of the standard non-emergency-row Y seats as well. The legroom is perfectly fine and my back is OK. I haven't tried to get sleep, though, in an attempt to crash through the jetlag and knock my body-clock into shape the hard way. I have to get up at 5 a.m. for a 12-hour day shift in just under 48 hours time, groan.
Miscellaneous remarks of style: NW isn't nearly as fun as VS, oddly enough, but there are a few other similarities. The decor isn't a million miles away from VS's, though rather more cream and rather less silver. The bathrooms were particularly reminiscent of the VS style, particularly in the distinctive tap fittings. All told, there's an air of quiet competence, though I will note their habit of setting take-off and landing times which could be considered far from challenging, allowing a lot of leeway between the scheduled takeoff and landing times for the predicted duration of the flight. Some conservatism in this regard makes sense (being able to rely on flight times is helpful, and the snowy weather knocking out much of the Eastern Seaboard hasn't had all that much effect on NW's operations) but perhaps this is massaging the figures for the sake of an excellent 'on time ratio' slightly too far. Cleanliness might have been slightly better; nobody likes blobs of gummy detritus, even little ones, on the backs of seats behind tray tables.
So comparing the overall transatlantic NW A330 Y package to other flights I have taken, using the V-Flyer scale to attempt a direct comparison to VS and others:
Check-in gets full marks; the pointer would be right over at 'good'. Very little queueing, good attitudes and domestic leg upgrades. Best of breed.
Seats get full marks, bearing in mind that I don't think this actually requires perfection. All the Es: the exit row seat was excellent and the general seat exceeded expectations for economy.
Food and drink get three-quarter marks. I've had far worse and the salad on the way there stood out positively. On the other hand, dessertrs were merely serviceable and drink service was perfunctory.
Entertainment gets three-quarter marks. The range of choice was excellent and kick-ass trivia is always a plus point, but the rebooting was no fun and the quality of what was on offer wasn't what it might have been.
Cabin crew, plural, also get three-quarter marks: half-marks plus for the way there and full marks minus for the way back.
Pretty impressive scoring, though the overall effect is definitely slightly less than the sum of the parts. I've given VS lower scores than this in the past, but I wouldn't pick NW over VS head-to-head on the same route ceteris paribus. (Or even ceteris airbus.)
(Incidentally, NW's World Business Class looked to be really nothing terribly special, as far as I could tell through looking in enviously; even the legroom didn't seem to be particularly generous. Obviously I wouldn't kick it out of bed given the chance; perhaps I've just been spoiled by reading so much discussion of completely flat beds, suites and the like?)
So to the domestic leg. I had concerns that the connections might be a little tight, especially considering I had to go through the INS in Detroit and dealt with an officer who was evidently trying hard to play by every rule in the book, even sending two people to the back of the line for incorrectly completed forms. Detroit seems to be a reasonably nice airport, though. I particularly like the little internal tram that runs down the length of the terminal; the power source is unexpectedly and pleasingly low-tech, merely being a long cable running around rollers - more like a ski-lift than anything else, then. Perhaps really fast moving walkways like they have in France might suit them better, though.
As discussed, my Silver status in CO OnePass got me a free status upgrade, which was a first in my experience, but the result was terribly disappointing. The flight was listed as two hours and ten minutes, but the actual flying time for the 572 miles was revised down to just an hour and two-fifths. The aircraft was a DC-9; there were four rows in first class, arranged 2-2, in front of the 2-3 coach class, and just half full on the two legs I flew. Obviously we had priority boarding, we had our own toilet and our own attendant, who took our coats, and they were rather more forthcoming with entire cans of drink rather than single glasses, and three or four bags of (pretty decent) mini pretzels rather than one.
The seat was extremely padded, as wide as you might expect and there was good legroom. Other than that, though... nuthin'. No extra snacks, no extra rounds of drinks, not even any sort of entertainment beyond the same magazine featured on the transatlantic leg. Perhaps hoping for freshly-baked cookies or hand-made ice-cream sundaes was a little much - that's the preserve of domestic First only within transcontinental three-class, I guess, not a 600-mile hop. Still, it completely failed to put the F in fun. (Oh, I do like their old-fashioned logo - not their new one - which looks either like a capital N or a capital W depending on whether you squint or not.)
Let's not end on a downer, though. The transatlantic service was as good as any I've had barring VS and BA, and not out of the league of the British carriers. Definitely preferable to DL, AA or AC in my experience and leagues ahead of the dread Ic*l*ndA*r. Worth the extra leg and extra time to save some money compared to Delta? Based on this very small sample, definitely!