Aircraft: Airbus 318
Class: Club World
Distance flown: 3459 miles
Tier points: 210
Check in for the London City flight is with the First check in desks, I'm offered a shower at the Raddison Blue on arrival which I am going to be grateful for as I connect later in the day on to Helsinki so I'll have 3 flights between hotel.
The First class security clearance is at a standstill, the police seem to have stopped a chap ahead in the queue for some reason. After a while his bag is taken back and he is brought back through handcuffed. There are a few "good job guys" exchanged and then the queue is moving again.
I go through to the galleries lounge and it is absolutely full. It's almost standing room only, if I was not travelling alone I'd have struggled to get a seat and there were a few groups just standing with drinks.
I've got pre flight dining with my flight as its a sleeper flight but I'm not ready to eat yet so I just sit down andtry to catch up with work, I can't say it was the most productive couple of hours of my life.
I go to the pre flight dining section and get a pretty nice meal, some ribs with salad and then I try the spaghetti carbonara finished off with a selection of cheese and a glass of wine.
I’m ready
for a sleep as I board this flight, with any luck getting a solid few hours now
will help to minimise the jet lag once I’m back in Europe.
We board,
the flight is pretty much full and everyone seems ready to get straight down to
bed.
I’m
beginning to hate JFK, the captain tells us that there is a queue of 20 planes
in front of us waiting to take off and we’re going to be taxiing for 30 minutes
to get a take off slot. On every occasion this trip there has been a
significant delay in both getting into and out of JFK for one reason or
another.
Pretty
annoying and I’m starting to regret drinking 3 pints of water in the lounge
before take off as the need to visit the bathroom becomes more urgent.
I’m in a window seat just in front of the wing which means
I’ll be clambering over the chap next to me to make bathroom visits.
A full flight makes it a little less private than the 13
passenger flight out.
Once we are in the air I nip to the bathroom, then put the
seat into bed mode and settle down. I drift off to sleep pretty easily and am
woken up mid flight by a chap behind making noise which I can only describe as
snoring whilst gargling listorine. Genuinely amusing to hear him..... for a moment, then massively annoying as I try to get back down to sleep.
I roll over and get back to sleep. I’m woken up to hear
breakfast being served but decide to get another 30 minutes kip before landing
as I’m under the impression that there is breakfast on offer at the arrivals
facility in the Raddison Blue.
With 30 minutes to landing the seats go back up and we’re
all set to descend into LCY, we’re about 30 minutes late due to the traffic in
JFK and a lack of tail wind across the Atlantic. The flight has been very
smooth.
The landing into LCY seems a little steeper than usual and
the plane hits the runway reasonably hard, I guess this might be standard on
this flight due to the short runway, the plane certainly has to brake very hard
once its down. a very short bus hop from the plane to the terminal building and a very short walk through to border control, only our flight to clear so I breeze through. All in all a very nice experience.
As part of the service you can book an arrivals shower at
the Raddison Blue when you check in at JFK and as I was essentially
transferring through from LAX-HEL without a hotel I needed a shower and so
booked in for this. A chauffer picked 2 of us up from LCY and took us the 5
minutes to he Raddison Blue.
To be honest it was a bit of a shambles at the Raddison Blue, we gave our names at the reception and were forwarded to the spa, at the
spa there was nobody around and we had to use a telephone to raise someone to
assist us. We were then shown to a treatment room each in the spa which was a
bit odd. It had a massage table in the middle of the room with scented candles
and the shower was a walk in room to the side. There was a basin but no toilet.
The facilities in the admirals lounge in LAX were far more suitable for getting
off a flight and freshening up.
No breakfast was on offer (maybe we were too late, maybe
it’s only on the earlier flight). There was nothing particularly wrong with the
offering but the actually explanation of what’s available at the Raddison Blue
and the cold reception from the staff at the hotel really let BA down. The other
chap, who was American, agreed completely.
I have some time to kill before my connection in LHR so I
take the DLR over to the Emirates air line and cross the Thames over to the
dome. From here I get on the underground to see how easy it is to get to LHR
via the underground.
Its actually surprisingly simple, it was just over 1 hour
from the Dome to LHR terminal 3. I fell asleep on the tube and woke up
dribbling 2 stops before LHR. Given that no one seemed to take any notice of this I'm going to assume it to be normal behaviour for tired tube riders.
