This is a Trip Report from the Premium Economy cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
Seat
Cabin Crew
First TR for a while - first time I've had much to say recently, which should be a good thing, I suppose!
My colleague and I left Lincoln at around 5.30am in a hire car (crappy gutless Fiat Punto - I shall have words with our travel cell when I get back) and got to Heathrow about 9am, having dropped the car off at the Avis depot. Check-in went very smoothly and as requested, we were moved to seats 18A and 18C (bulkhead seats in PE. As I'm FC Gold, use of Fast Track though security was offered and when we saw the size of the queue for standard security, Fast track was very welcome!
It was the first time my colleague has been in the CH, and was duly impressed. An excellent breakfast, followed by a sharp haircut at the Cowshed - thank you!
The fun and games started once we had boarded. Due to an unspecified problem with ATC, we pushed back around 20 minutes late. We taxied out but stopped again short of the entrance to the active runway. After about 10 minutes, the captain announced that due to to further ATC problems, we would be delayed again. 10 minutes later he piped up again to say that we were now in the queue for takeoff but there were 10-12 aircraft that needed to get airborne ahead of us and that there would be a further wait. All in all, we sat there for an 1 hour and 10 minutes; at no time was the seat belt light switched off and pax were not allowed to go to the toilet. As the flight deck crew knew that we would be on the ground a while, it would have been nice to allow the pax to nip to the loo! (We had been on the aircraft nearly 2 hours by the time we eventually took off).
The crew were attentive and as polite as usual, but for the first time in about six flights, I didn't get a welcome from the CSS/FSM as a FC Gold member. This usually includes a glass of decent champagne and is a nice touch if you're travelling in PE or down the back - hopefully not a sign of things to come? Any cabin crew care to comment?
The meal was very good (Chicken, potato and leek gratin) but the pasta salad was awful. I'm not exactly a fan of pasta so someone of more refined taste might like it, but I didn't! Throughout the rest of the flight, the crew were excellent, bringing water, orange juice, fruit, ice cream and so on at regular intervals.
The aircraft was Maiden Tokyo, and although still fitted with the old PE seats, she looked in good condition overall. However, my seat (Seat 18A) had problems with the audio on about half of the video channels and eventually I was offered a DVD player for the remainder of the journey.
The only other downside was that sitting behind me was a portly old dear with an hearing aid. Clearly she had never flown before as she was very surprised when I reclined my seat after the meal! At no stage did she actually complain, but she went on and on about 'having a young man in her lap' throughout the entire rest of the flight. She also needed me to put the seat back up every time she needed to get up, which meant I had a hard time getting any sleep. Added to this, her ****** hearing aid kept squealing and feeding back, and as she couldn't hear it, the poor lady sitting next to her had to keep telling her what it was doing. She also spoke so loudly it would have been impossible to sleep anyway.......
Bless her - I know I'll get old one day, but I'd just about had enough by the time we hit TOD.
Arrivals and immigration were fine but as usual, the bags appeared at a completely different carousel to the one indicated on the screens. And once again, the baggage handlers insisted on unloading all of the bags from the carousel and placing them in rows between the carousels - not exactly easy to find your bag and definitely not such a good idea when the terminal is a busy as it was on Sunday! Why do they do it? There were three carousels unused!!!! So after a rugby scrum to get our bags we headed for the top floor of the terminal and the transfer to United....onwards to Norfolk, VA.
Here's to the legs home!
Cheers
Tony
