This is a Trip Report from the Premium Economy cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
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Cabin Crew
My meeting ended early, so I headed to the Amtrak station in Philly for 16:00 and adjusted my ticket to get me to Penn St Station NYC rather than EWR. Due to the extreme high temperatures the Amtrak had some speed restrictions, so we got into NYC just before 18:00. From there I took the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) 18:27 train for two stops to Jamaica where you can transfer to the JFK Airtrain.
I arrived at the Premium Economy checkin (which was empty
) just after 19:00 and announced my presence -- although the staff were unaware of the late running of VS002 the computer knew I was coming and the boarding pass was sorted with no fuss 
Going through TSA security I was directed to a short line which was good. Once through I decided to call Purple Parking to advise of the flight change - this was to take quite some time as it was past midnight UK time- while doing that I decided to eat in the terminal at the Palm Bar and Grille. Noisy but the food was good. After about 40 minutes on hold I got through to PP and advised them of the change.
The inbound flight had arrived about 15 minutes late, so we boarded at 10pm rather than 9:45pm. At the gate, Upper Class and Premium economy were all called for priority boarding at the same. There were 268 passengers on the flight. I took my seat, which was very comfortable, the extra width and legroom makes all the difference for an overnight flight. We pushed back at 10:45pm and spent a long time taxiing, a downside of JFK, it took about an hour to get airborne. I was quite tired so fell asleep almost immediately and slept most of the way, waking up for breakfast. The food itself was pretty average. I did at that point try out the VERA touch, which in theory looks very good, however my screen only seemed to have the flight map working, with all the other menus not showing the content. So as usual I instead used an idevice.
Arriving back to LHR we spent about 20 minutes in a hold pattern, and we touched down about an hour late at 11:30. The bag was in the first batch to come off the carousel, and the car was waiting at PP, so I was on the M4 and heading towards home just after noon. Looking at the flight status, it seems VS002 made up some time over its original estimate departing EWR at 1.06am and landing at LHR at 12:45pm. For me though every hour counts at the weekend so happy with routing via JFK, and the VS handling of the situation.
Last edited by stratton on 20 Jul 2013, 08:04, edited 1 time in total.
