Delhi or Mumbai UC

All,

I am thinking of taking the offer to travel UC to either Delhi or Mumbai. The deciding factor for me would be whether the aircraft had the UCS or not.

I spoke with the Virgin agent about travel to Mumbai on 03Feb - 08Feb.
They told me that the current aircraft schedule is for the A340-300, which does NOT have the UCS, but the 300 series re-fit for the UCS is nearly complete, and I 'could' be on a UCS aircraft. Is this correct?
Virgin website suggest that 'some' selected flight to Mumbai do have the suite, but rather than asking her to trawl through loads of dates, what can I do to find out, other than to write the trip off?

I checked this against the V-Tool and the suite has only been used a handful of times.

So what to do!
Jon

With the impending departure of G-VSUN there should be only two non suite planes (both A343's) in the VS fleet.

These remaining planes are not scheduled to leave until the end of the year, so it is inevitable that they will fly somewhere up to that point.

It does seem that the DEL and BOM flights get their fare share of non-suite A343's, and it does seem to be quite random when they fly(my December VS17/18 flights to EWR were changing from suite/non-suite often in the days before the flight).

I wouldn't rely on having UCS on these flights personally.

Thanks Richard,

I guess your right, they have to fly somewhere. I'll give Virgin another call Monday with a few more dates, and see if that changes anything.

To be honest, I have flown the J2000 seats before and I thought they were ace, but just having been in the UCS, I just want more!

Flew on VS351 BOM-LHR in UC on Jan 2, 2006. Booked the flight in March 2005 and saw that it was a on old A340-300. Chose great seats as we had booked so early. Checked up the booking in October and saw that it had changed to an A340-300 with UCS. Fantastic! Chose 4K and 5K so we could sit next to each other instead of across the aisle.

Logged-on again in mid-December before we flew LHR-DEL (we knew that this was going to be the old style seat all along. Found that I have been too pampered by UCS as I could not get comfortable when trying to sleep. Have gotten use to sleeping on my side in UCS rather than facing upwards which you have to do on the old seats) and the BOM-LHR flight was still UCS.

Thankfully, I did an OLCI in BOM the night before. We still had 4K and 5K but the plane had switched back to the old-sytle seats. Worse, I could see 5H was free but was not allowed to change my seat for some reason. At check-in when we asked to be seated together, the rather unhelpful check-in girl just kept ranting on that the flight was very full and said that 4K was merely in front of 5K. Sooo? Thankfully, the supervisor can by, after we were fairly insistent that we had been split up by VS changing the plane configuration late, and point out to her that 5H was free (still!). I think she was looking for 2 free seats together rather than looking if one seat next to our exisiting seats were going spare. Anyway, at least knew we were seated together before boarding.

When we got on board, the poor crew were trying to piece a major jigsaw puzzle together as various parties and family had been broken up but various single passengers were seat next to them who were more than happy to swap seats. Anyway, as there was one spare seat in UC that day, everyone managed to swap around and were happy in the end. Between the late change of plane and the unhelpful ground staff, confusion reigned for a while. This is the only time selecting your seat on-line may actually be unhelpful as the computer does not know how to keep parties together. They just keep your seat type (window/aisle).

To be honest, while I did miss the flat bed, what I really did miss on my BOM-LHR flight which is a day flight, is the V-port IFE system. Still at least Arcadia has a really decent poker game to play which V-port does not.

Geez, well the offer ends Monday, so I guess I got to make a decision.

I would be travelling with somebody else, so I guess as long as we were sitting together (in the J2000) it wouldn't matter that much...except of course it isn't the UCS.

How spoilt have we become with the UCS!

Originally posted by Richard28
It does seem that the DEL and BOM flights get their fare share of non-suite A343's

As well as Nigerian aircraft of course richard..Oh! wash my mouth out. Apologies to the OP, please ignore this (lighthearted) post, as I am sure you will not get a Nigerian aircraft;)

Originally posted by sailor99
As well as Nigerian aircraft of course richard..Oh! wash my mouth out. Apologies to the OP, please ignore this (lighthearted) post, as I am sure you will not get a Nigerian aircraft;)

sshhhhh!!

I was trying my best not to mention that :D

[Scrooge]

Originally posted by sailor99

Originally posted by Richard28
It does seem that the DEL and BOM flights get their fare share of non-suite A343's

As well as Nigerian aircraft of course richard..Oh! wash my mouth out. Apologies to the OP, please ignore this (lighthearted) post, as I am sure you will not get a Nigerian aircraft;)

Just over 7 hrs [B)]

edit because I cant tell the time [B)][:#]