This is a Trip Report from the Upper Class cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
Seat
Cabin Crew
Starting with a big thunderstorm around tea time & horrible traffic on the way to the airport, i made myself comfortable in a busy clubhouse with a couple of Sam Adams & a bowl of chowder. The clubhouse quietened significantly once the Iberia Madrid passengers left but just after this we got the first announcement of a delay due to a technical issue with an update promised by 8:30pm (departure was supposed to be 7:45pm). Just a little after 8:30 we were told the new boarding time would be 9:15pm & thankfully this turned out to be accurate.
On boarding we found out from a crew member that the delay had been due to a fault with the IFE which eventually they had had to disable for the duration of the flight. He was at pains to point out that the reason this had been worked on for 2 hours was to make sure there were no other gremlins in the electrical system (my words, not his
). As i was in the snooze zone anyway the lack of IFE wasn't an issuethe flight deck announced a 5.5 hour flight time which seemed like it would claw back the initial delay but just as it seemed we were back on track a further announcement from the captain told us that a family had been removed from the flight due to being drunk & aggressive towards the cabin crew, the need to remove their bags held us up a further 30 minutes.
We finally got into the air by 10pm, just over 2 hours late, but the short flight time & thankfully light traffic over london saw us touch down just after 9am. On disembarking i realised we had been on Mustang Sally with her spanky new paint job, it certainly looks fresh compared to the other planes she was parked up alongside.
thankfully i still made my connection in T5 but had to sacrifice breakfast in revivals. Still, there's always my next trip to Newark the week after next...
