Originally posted by Pete
I did a couple of trips with AA back in 2001/2002. Can't say they were terrible, but I did get the impression I was flying the equivalent of a beaten-up station wagon, and being looked after by ladies who wouldn't be out of place serving in a truck stop diner and probably smoked 60-a-day for the last 40 years. Nothing terribly wrong with either aspect; but hardly encouraging me back.
Agreed - I haven't flown longhaul AA since about 2002/3 in F LGW-RDU-LGW. From the lounge at LGW through the food & beverage and to the crew, it was all rather tired and clearly cutbacks where rife. However, the one redeeming facet was that I do particularly remember being very impressed at being immediately greeted by name at the door by an FA who'd been on the outbound on the return segment ~28 hours later.
Well I remained impressed until a few weeks ago when an identical situation happened on EK MEL-AKL-MEL. Again at the door on the return segment a day later one of the FAs greeted me gushingly, but then spoilt the illusion by saying they'd seen my name of the F manifest. Purely coincidentally, she was from Hull [:p]. Also I turned out to be the only pax on F. Sadly, rather than take advantage of the three FAs to one pax ratio, because I'd been on a solid eating and drinking frenzy with Decker in the previous 24 hours, all I wanted to do was sleep. (On one of these short EK trans-Tasman segments recently, I did manage to sample the entire wine list of eight different wines on offer in F but that's a whole other story).
Cheers, Howard