This is a Trip Report from the Premium Economy cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
Seat
Cabin Crew
Sunday came, and time to leave the Renaissance in Times Square, and caught the E train to JFK. Not a bad ride, took about an hour, with delays on the subway, changing for a shuttle then the airtrain. Not great if you have lots of luggage, too many stairs, lifts and escalators to manoeuvre round.
Check in was packed. They were trying to find the pax for the 19:30 flight to get them checked in first. There were about 3 people in the PE queue and 6 in the UC one, took a while to get to the front.
Even though I was three hours till the flight, row 70 had gone, so stayed with my 74C seat. Took my luggage over to be screened and wandered down to wait for my flight.
JFK really does need more seats. They seem to have enough seats for the catering outlets, or there's some concrete type ones scattered around which seem to be designed for maximum discomfort.
Wandered down to the gate at about 20:15, and spotted Cosmic Girl again, the plane I'd come out on (not in the closet sense!). Shuffled over to the priority boarding lane, and headed off onto the plane.
I noticed they had fixed the bit of plastic that was hanging off the side of the table, but the two screens that weren't working on the way out weren't used so not sure if they'd fixed them as well.
Suddenly, as it from nowhere, the screams of an infant were heard from the row in front. Two flights in a row with screaming brats. What are the chances?! [:(!]. The mother was getting a lot of angry looks from people, but did nothing to stop the wailing banshee from shutting up.
One passenger seemed to be getting the PE+ treatment, but couldn't work out why. Lots of attention paid to him throughout the flight.
Whilst we pushed back at 21:17, rolling fog descended on JFK, so we didn't go too far. The captain reported that he could see at least 20 planes in front of him waiting to take off, so allowing a few minutes for each, it could take 45-60 mins before we get in the air. We shuffle along the taxi way and there's a few announcements telling people to 'sit down (I guess some Y pax decided they could get up) as we were on a live taxi.'
It must have been about 22:30 when we finally get in the air. To be fair to the mother/child in front, the child made no more noise once in the air, so can't really moan too much about that, though she did immediately recline fully squashing my knees.
The cabin lights stayed off completely until arrival, so quite dark thoroughout. A meal service then brandy or baileys and not much was seen of the crew till the muffin came round.
An uneventful flight from then on, landed 1h10m late, and again no priority baggage tags on any bags that I could see, and mine took quite a while to come out.
So, an average flight really. I've now got over 40k miles though, so I need to think about where to go for my UCS upgrade trip soon.
Oh, and if anyone's bored, my trip photos are here
