This is a Trip Report from the Economy cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
Seat
Cabin Crew
G-VWOW (747-400)
Gate 20
Economy, seats 50B and 50C
This would be the first time I had left the continent for just over a year, so I was looking forward to reacquainting myself with the Virgin experience. Enough had changed from what I had remembered to provide a few surprises, mostly rather pleasant ones.
Probably the single biggest glitch of the trip - and, even then, it's not a biggie - came when my wife and I checked in on-line but did not receive our boarding passes by e-mail. Not having been to Heathrow recently, the terranean entrance to Tentacle 3 was new to me, but rather attractive. The check-in area was pleasantly quiet, with very little queueing. We nipped to the downstairs loos and glanced jealously at the invitation-only lift to the private security channel.
It was a Good Heathrow Day; the queue at security was as short as any we could remember, well under ten minutes, so we took the opportunity to stare into mirrors and register for IRIS. A quick trip to WHSmith followed to buy a copy of The Times, accompanied by a free bottle of Vittel, only to return the newspaper which I had already read to the bin whence it had come, and we wandered down the rather tatty-looking carpets towards Gate 20. The whole check-in-to-gate procedure took well under an hour. No gate had been announced by the advertised boardng time; perhaps, if Heathrow can consistently have more of these good days then we can adjust our expectations about how long we need to leave before we... leave. (Or perhaps the early afternoon is just a good time of day to travel?)
We were surprised by the ten-minute-plus queue outside Gate 20, which is not a step of the process I was expecting. While we waited, we saw our 'plane through a window; I spotted it was G-VWOW and had a vague good feeling about this. Mrs. Dickoon, while detained alongside me, unpromptedly pulled out her generic mobile Internet device and looked G-VWOW up on V-Flyer, announcing that apparently it had been the first 'plane to have V:Port fitted. I beamed; she said 'You're just grinning like a Cheshire cat, aren't you?', to which I responded 'I'm so proud of you right now...'
Our number was up once we reached the head of this particular line and we were both pulled aside for further searches, but at least there was no queue getting on board after that. Our seats were next to the central galley, which proved not to be as noisy as we feared. I'm not sure whether I had used this design of Y seat before and found it started to become uncomfortable very quickly, but Mrs. D pointed out that the padded head-rest could be slid up and down - which, for some reason, I had not picked up on myself - and making the height adjustment made a tremendous difference. The seat seemed to be fully operative and the legroom was adequate.
I don't have data about when we actually took off, but based on an assortment of trip reports, I was pleasantly surprised (!!) by how soon after take-off the IFE was turned on - about half-way through the headphone distribution process - and there weren't the adverts and news bulletins that I remembered. The system response was slow to begin with; perhaps turning the system on before everyone had headphones with which to fully appreciate the facilities may have been a deliberate load-balancing tool. The line-up of films was strangely disappointing; my wife, who had only ever flown on a V:Port 'plane once before (and that was on an overnight flight which she wanted to spend sleeping) found a black comedy that was full of laughs, a particularly kiddy Disney flick and a TV pilot episode.
Thus I sprinted through a silly Chinese variety show with sub-Saturday Night Takeaway games (well, I wasn't likely to get to see it anywhere else!) and enjoyed having radio shows to listen to. The two episodes of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue recorded in Sunderland were up to the show's high standard even despite the absence of Mornington Crescent from the pair; it was a strange and sad counterpoint to read of the passing of Humphrey Lyttelton as one of the first web pages I saw the next time I came online. What a pity that he and his trumpet shall now forever remain mute.
The other, er, 'audio book' (apparently) that I listened two consisted of two episodes of Does The Team Think...?, Vic Reeves' return vehicle for Radio 2. A panel of four wits issues non-sequitur answers to silly questions, but it just doesn't compare either in inventiveness or feigned tips of the hat of subtlety. It's as if it were an assortment of the material that Shooting Stars decided to edit out, and made it clearer than ever that perhaps Bob Mortimer really was the comic genius of the pair after all. And yet, yet, during the second episode of the two - with a considerably weaker panel - was just, just, starting to get into it as the slowest of burners.
Along with those, I read America Unchained by Dave Gorman, a tale of an attempt to cross the United States avoiding chain hotels, chain restaurants and chain gas stations in an attempt to celebrate 'Mom and Pop' businesses and avoiding giving money to 'The Man'. I have a lot of time for Dave Gorman, as a glorious example of a mainstream geek made good, and enjoy his easy-going storytelling of self-imposed quests more than I enjoy those written by, say, Tony Hawkes simply because Dave so obviously enjoys the company of so many of the people he meets along the way and he has a real talent for communicating the delight to us, the readers. That said, he clearly doesn't enjoy the first half of his trip, which turns out far from the way he had hoped, and this comes through in his writing; he simply isn't having enough fun to permit him to be funny, which is something I wouldn't have expected. In the second half of the book he hits his stride, but he cops out when it comes to the ending of the book, which is a particular disappointment for me as Mrs. D comes from the last state he encounters, because he sails right through it. Certainly not a bad book, but disappointing due to not being nearly up to the very entertaining standard of his others. I look forward to seeing the DVD at some point; I had thought that this would be a story far better read than viewed, but I suspect it has the potential to emphasise the humour of the trip far more effectively on-screen. Aaaaand back to what the Virgin experience was like.
Dinner came quickly; alongside the usual suspects of pasta salad, Roland Butter, cheese'n'crackers and a cheeky little potlet of sludge decanted from the old Terry's Chocolate Orange factory, the choice was steak and ale stew with mashed potatoes, or chicken and mushroom with potato wedges. I went for the beef and found it... adequate. On the other hand, all the confectionary was lovely; this remains a route with a choc ice (plain vanilla - not as exciting as the rippled ones we used to get, but served at a less teeth-smashingly cold temperature) and the evening snack was a Gu brownie. At heart, I think much of Virgin's appeal is to the kid in us; they get the entertainment right and the sweeties right and that's enough to get a lot of people to forgive a lot of other problems, firmly including me. I still recall - and miss - a particularly good Greek salad wrap that Virgin served me one teatime years ago, though.
There's not a lot else to say. I'd estimate the load factor in Y at probably over 90%, which kept the staff busy. I didn't see much of them, but I certainly didn't see them slacking. Nobody did anything obvious to merit a Heroes award, but I can't fault them for quiet competence. I reclined my seat between the choc ice and the brownie and had an hour's sleep, which again easily meets my expectations. I considered the flight to be less turbulent than most, but my wife was starting to suffer a little by the end. We touched down 25 minutes early; there was a ripple of applause from ahead, but on this occasion we didn't conduct it down the cabin. Newark had nearly as good a day as Heathrow: travelling alongside a US citizen, I had one of the friendliest immigration officer experiences I can recall, and I only had to wait about half a song before our bags came around on the carousel.
The running theme of this review is 'you can't ask for much more than that'; possibly discouraged by what I've read from TRs recently, I kept my expectations humble and was pleasantly surprised. (Perhaps it's just that I don't fly TATL nearly as much as I did when my now-wife was a long-distance lover and so some of the novelty of flight has returned!) Let's whisk up some scores for the doors, like so:
Check-in: 70%, losing points for not e-mailing us boarding passes to print out.
Pre-flight experience: OK, this isn't a category with its own little dial, but perhaps it should have one to cover everything from the ground staff to the lounge. I'll start the bidding at about 70% simply for Heathrow being so much less manic than I can remember.
Seats: a painful-in-under-two-minutes 30% when sitting straight upright with the headrest as low as it'll go, a lovely 90% when I have reclined and made the headrest work. Because you can't always be reclined, though you can always play with your headrest, the truth lies between the two, somewhere around the 70% mark.
Food and drink: 90% for the sweet things, possibly assisted by the fact that my sweet tooth got second helpings from my wife's cast-offs, and 45% or 50% for the savoury things. 65% seems more appropriate than 70% here, taking drinks into account.
Entertainment: 75%, which is probably as low a score as I have given V:Port. Loads of options; while the material wasn't generally nearly as much to my taste as I recall, there was enough to keep me busy and I didn't even dip into the games.
Cabin Crew: 80% for being perfectly professional and pleasant, but stretched enough by the demands of their job that our interactions were low-key. No bonus points but nevertheless an appreciative smile for both the men and the women looking mighty attractive; I was particularly taken with the FA with a passing resemblance to Carrie Fisher, and the one who reminded me of Princess Anne Back When She Won Sports Personality Of The Year can be proud of her aesthetics as well.
Overall: better than the sum of its parts, really gaining from the fact that things were consistently 'easily good enough' across the board. 80% sounds about right; I'd be happy if all of my flights were at least this good. Many thanks, Virgin staff!
As a postscript, much of this review was written at the Sheraton Newark Airport, picked up inexpensively from Hotwire. Excellent bed, good room, decent bathroom, minus lots of points for room service taking over an hour to deliver two pizzas.
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