OW Mileage Run: Part 1-HKG-JFK-YVR on CX in J
Jun 25, 2003, 1:20 pm
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OW Mileage Run: Part 1-HKG-JFK-YVR on CX in J
My girlfriend thinks I'm mad, but here I am at the start of an extended mileage run which will see me flying 32660 miles in 108 hours. She will start over 4 days later and fly HKG-HEL.
(I'll divide it into three reports since the flights fit neatly that way... the first is CX, the others will be AA around N America and across the Atlantic, and the third BA to Cairo plus Finnair to Helsinki.)
And what better way to start than in The Wing (First Class)?
(Well actually I can think of better ways to start, but most of them involve Cathay ISMs and pearls being strewn all over the Airport Express, which I fear is one of my less likely fantasies
)
In fact, before getting to The Wing I had to stop off at the Cathay ticketing desk to get my DONE3 (One World Explorer, 3 Continent RTW in business) rerouted since the location of the holiday at the end of this run has moved from Istanbul to Helsinki and Tallinn. You never quite know how much of a trial it is going to be when you need to do this, but I have never had a bad experience at Chek Lap Kok with either the BA or CX ticketing people. The CX desk does, however, have a big advantage over the BA one: it is right next to the CX Cabin Crew Operations area - the view in the (very efficient) 25 minutes that it took Eric to do the reroute was therefore very acceptable.
So then on to The Wing, via having a probe stuck in my ear. I knew from the check-in girls (who were very restrained in not calling me a complete bozo out loud for flying HKG-YVR-JFK-YVR on the same plane) that J was over-booked so I was living in hope of being paged in The Wing. Unfortunately, only one name on CX888 was called, and it wasn't mine. But still, it was new Business Class, I had secured 86A and I was planning on staying awake anyway, so no big deal. Well apart from the caviar, the Krug and the Lynch-Bages...
What can I write about The Wing that hasn't already been said? You can take as read that the afternoon buffet (salads, sushi, dim sum, satay, Singapore Fried rice, hot and cold noodles, cheese board, fruit, desserts, pralines) was as good as ever. The wines were the usual ones, which number_6 and others feel do not meet the requisite standards, but frankly I feel very passable champagne (albeit non-vintage) and a selection of at least 8 wines, none of which is plonk, is perfectly OK. They have always had a slight problem identifying different types of cheese (stilton was labelled as roquefort today) but since I tend to have a bit of everything it doesn't bother me.
I made a call to the ever-efficient Mrs Sobhi to make sure that my next ticket (an AONE3) would be ready for me on Saturday morning when I reached Cairo approaching the end of the mileage run. And she apparently knew my requirements from memory and gave me every confidence that nothing will go wrong on my flying visit there.
And so to boarding, stopping off only to change the FF number to my AAdvantage one, given that the Diamond card (now comped by CX through to January 2005) hadn't done the job. HK when I left was having a really gorgeous day, but it was really hot - officially 33 or so this afternoon but much hotter out in the sun on the tarmac. Unfortunately B-HOY (one of the "HK - Asia's World City" liveries) had been sitting in that sun for some hours, and been towed to the stand not long before boarding, so the temperature in the cabin was probably around 38-40 degrees. Many apologies ensued from the crew as the ground power struggled to bring the temperature down. Copious juice, water and fizz was handed out.
We pushed back nearly 20 minutes behind schedule, although the captain promised a more or less on-time arrival in Vancouver. Once we got going the temperature dropped pretty quickly, but by that time even the cabin crew were on the sticky side of glowing.
In-flight it's Cathay NBC: what can I say? 52 channels of video-on-demand (27 movies, 25 "TV" channels), 92 CDs worth of audio-on-demand plus 25 traditional audio channels, a comfortable go-flat (though not quite horizontal) seat, in-seat laptop power (and the more or less useless Tenzing email and web cache system), legendary service, more pretty good food than anyone could reasonably eat over about 8 hours (5-course late lunch, mid-flight refreshments, 2-course brunch), and palatable (although, it has to be said, not very exciting) wine. The "green stuff" (aka Cathay Delight - a blend of kiwi, coconut milk, some chewy bits which I have never identifed, and a touch of mint) was refreshing as always.
For those interested in where we are with the SARS measures: there are no mask or gloves at all, but the towels still come packaged (glorified wetwipes). Most of the food and drink is more or less covered as it moves through the cabin, but this can't logically be achieiving anything significant and it looks a mess, so I hope it will be gone soon. The main courses are now brought out on the trolley with their foil lids on but the crew will happily lift them up for you to have a look; the upside of this is that the food is hotter when it gets to you.
It was an equally goregeous day when we arrived in Vancouver, except perhaps 10 degrees cooler. Cathay didn't manage to make up much time in the flight and the stopover dragged so we left Vancouver about 30 minutes late. A new crew, a few new and some of the HK passengers, including a group of 3 kids upstairs in business who had actually been pretty well behaved on the way over.
More food, more wine, and a couple of hours sleep on the transcon to JFK, and the bit that was worrying me about this run - a same plane international transit turnround in JFK. The US doesn't seem to want to do international transit the way the rest of the world does, so I had to enter the USA for about 10 minutes. When I hit the immigration queue there was a worrying 5 or 10 minutes while it seemed to make no progress at all, but then things picked up and I was through in about 20 mins after leaving the plane. No issues with the immigration official - told him that the next place I would sleep in a bed would be Finland and that "I had a couple of transit flights through the US before I got there". No problems - straight through. I look at other "aliens" in US immigration and it does seem to go much more quickly if you are native English speaking and holding a EU or Commonwealth passport. They were pulling a lot of people for customs inspections as well, but that has never happened to me anywhere.
So I walked round to the BA check-in desk which handles Cathay. It was pretty deserted since we were only about 40 mins from the scheduled departure of the flight, Without any clues, the check-in agent addressed me by name as I walked up. This is either very efficient or a bit scary, depending on your point of view. Again I got the boarding card reissued with the AA Number (and a gate number since that is apparently required in the US now) and proceeded to the BA lounge. Again the girl on the desk addressed me by name without seeing any papers... maybe my reputation as a nutcase preceeds me?
I still had time to grab a quick "soda" as they say here, but I had to go to the business class lounge to find a phone line with local access to catch up on email. Since there were less than 10 people in total in the two lounges this wasn't a big deal.
The crew at JFK did a great job with the turnround - got in 30 mins late, departed on time, 75 mins later. This would be pretty stressful as a turnround if immigration were badly snarled up.
And back to 86A - the third consecutive flight on B-HOY - with the third different cabin crew (although the same flight deck crew does the turnround YVR-JFK-YVR).
In the interests of my neighbour in 86C a liberal squirt of the Paul Smith cologne was applied. The tricky bit on this route is finding places and time to have showers. At the end of this segment I have four hours in Vancouver, but (according to information received on FT) no lounge access, and I'm hoping that there will be somewhere for me to freshen up in Dallas when I get there. But US lounges are so basic I'm not confident about this, even at AA's home airport. Once I get to Europe I know I will have no problem getting a shower on my two transits through Heathrow.
CX889 leaves JFK at 23:55 so there is only a supper service which I guess less than half of the people took. This time main courses were ordered from the menu and the whole meal delivered on the tray (with covers). Drinks orders were also taken individually - the trolley wasn't used at all, presumably to minimise disturbance to the many passengers going straight to sleep.
All in all CX was its usual excellent self and I fear it is downhill from here, with the next few segments being on AA 757s. I managed to take in three movies (The Quiet American, The 25th Hour and The Blues Brothers - still a good movie, but better viewed through a slightly thicker alcoholic haze I feel), listen to some old people's CDs (Fleetwood Mac, The Stones, The Eagles, ...) and get plenty of work done thanks to the laptop power.
I only have two niggles about the whole CX part of the trip:
1) the "noise cancelling" headsets are really cheap. Perhaps due to extra stringent sterilising it seems that the foam pads are disintegrating faster, leaving people with lots of black specs around their ears.
2) Why amongst the 98 CDs is there not a single one with blues music? I'm not sure CX has quite got the balance of musical tastes of its premium class customers measured quite right. And please can we have Tommy Vance back instead of that idiot "Jed the Fish" who plays tracks like "Skippity-doo-dah" (from a Walt Disney film) on what is supposedly a rock channel! Doesn't someone vet this stuff?
Next up, AA...
[This message has been edited by christep (edited 06-25-2003).]
(I'll divide it into three reports since the flights fit neatly that way... the first is CX, the others will be AA around N America and across the Atlantic, and the third BA to Cairo plus Finnair to Helsinki.)
And what better way to start than in The Wing (First Class)?
(Well actually I can think of better ways to start, but most of them involve Cathay ISMs and pearls being strewn all over the Airport Express, which I fear is one of my less likely fantasies
)In fact, before getting to The Wing I had to stop off at the Cathay ticketing desk to get my DONE3 (One World Explorer, 3 Continent RTW in business) rerouted since the location of the holiday at the end of this run has moved from Istanbul to Helsinki and Tallinn. You never quite know how much of a trial it is going to be when you need to do this, but I have never had a bad experience at Chek Lap Kok with either the BA or CX ticketing people. The CX desk does, however, have a big advantage over the BA one: it is right next to the CX Cabin Crew Operations area - the view in the (very efficient) 25 minutes that it took Eric to do the reroute was therefore very acceptable.
So then on to The Wing, via having a probe stuck in my ear. I knew from the check-in girls (who were very restrained in not calling me a complete bozo out loud for flying HKG-YVR-JFK-YVR on the same plane) that J was over-booked so I was living in hope of being paged in The Wing. Unfortunately, only one name on CX888 was called, and it wasn't mine. But still, it was new Business Class, I had secured 86A and I was planning on staying awake anyway, so no big deal. Well apart from the caviar, the Krug and the Lynch-Bages...
What can I write about The Wing that hasn't already been said? You can take as read that the afternoon buffet (salads, sushi, dim sum, satay, Singapore Fried rice, hot and cold noodles, cheese board, fruit, desserts, pralines) was as good as ever. The wines were the usual ones, which number_6 and others feel do not meet the requisite standards, but frankly I feel very passable champagne (albeit non-vintage) and a selection of at least 8 wines, none of which is plonk, is perfectly OK. They have always had a slight problem identifying different types of cheese (stilton was labelled as roquefort today) but since I tend to have a bit of everything it doesn't bother me.
I made a call to the ever-efficient Mrs Sobhi to make sure that my next ticket (an AONE3) would be ready for me on Saturday morning when I reached Cairo approaching the end of the mileage run. And she apparently knew my requirements from memory and gave me every confidence that nothing will go wrong on my flying visit there.
And so to boarding, stopping off only to change the FF number to my AAdvantage one, given that the Diamond card (now comped by CX through to January 2005) hadn't done the job. HK when I left was having a really gorgeous day, but it was really hot - officially 33 or so this afternoon but much hotter out in the sun on the tarmac. Unfortunately B-HOY (one of the "HK - Asia's World City" liveries) had been sitting in that sun for some hours, and been towed to the stand not long before boarding, so the temperature in the cabin was probably around 38-40 degrees. Many apologies ensued from the crew as the ground power struggled to bring the temperature down. Copious juice, water and fizz was handed out.
We pushed back nearly 20 minutes behind schedule, although the captain promised a more or less on-time arrival in Vancouver. Once we got going the temperature dropped pretty quickly, but by that time even the cabin crew were on the sticky side of glowing.
In-flight it's Cathay NBC: what can I say? 52 channels of video-on-demand (27 movies, 25 "TV" channels), 92 CDs worth of audio-on-demand plus 25 traditional audio channels, a comfortable go-flat (though not quite horizontal) seat, in-seat laptop power (and the more or less useless Tenzing email and web cache system), legendary service, more pretty good food than anyone could reasonably eat over about 8 hours (5-course late lunch, mid-flight refreshments, 2-course brunch), and palatable (although, it has to be said, not very exciting) wine. The "green stuff" (aka Cathay Delight - a blend of kiwi, coconut milk, some chewy bits which I have never identifed, and a touch of mint) was refreshing as always.
For those interested in where we are with the SARS measures: there are no mask or gloves at all, but the towels still come packaged (glorified wetwipes). Most of the food and drink is more or less covered as it moves through the cabin, but this can't logically be achieiving anything significant and it looks a mess, so I hope it will be gone soon. The main courses are now brought out on the trolley with their foil lids on but the crew will happily lift them up for you to have a look; the upside of this is that the food is hotter when it gets to you.
It was an equally goregeous day when we arrived in Vancouver, except perhaps 10 degrees cooler. Cathay didn't manage to make up much time in the flight and the stopover dragged so we left Vancouver about 30 minutes late. A new crew, a few new and some of the HK passengers, including a group of 3 kids upstairs in business who had actually been pretty well behaved on the way over.
More food, more wine, and a couple of hours sleep on the transcon to JFK, and the bit that was worrying me about this run - a same plane international transit turnround in JFK. The US doesn't seem to want to do international transit the way the rest of the world does, so I had to enter the USA for about 10 minutes. When I hit the immigration queue there was a worrying 5 or 10 minutes while it seemed to make no progress at all, but then things picked up and I was through in about 20 mins after leaving the plane. No issues with the immigration official - told him that the next place I would sleep in a bed would be Finland and that "I had a couple of transit flights through the US before I got there". No problems - straight through. I look at other "aliens" in US immigration and it does seem to go much more quickly if you are native English speaking and holding a EU or Commonwealth passport. They were pulling a lot of people for customs inspections as well, but that has never happened to me anywhere.
So I walked round to the BA check-in desk which handles Cathay. It was pretty deserted since we were only about 40 mins from the scheduled departure of the flight, Without any clues, the check-in agent addressed me by name as I walked up. This is either very efficient or a bit scary, depending on your point of view. Again I got the boarding card reissued with the AA Number (and a gate number since that is apparently required in the US now) and proceeded to the BA lounge. Again the girl on the desk addressed me by name without seeing any papers... maybe my reputation as a nutcase preceeds me?
I still had time to grab a quick "soda" as they say here, but I had to go to the business class lounge to find a phone line with local access to catch up on email. Since there were less than 10 people in total in the two lounges this wasn't a big deal.
The crew at JFK did a great job with the turnround - got in 30 mins late, departed on time, 75 mins later. This would be pretty stressful as a turnround if immigration were badly snarled up.
And back to 86A - the third consecutive flight on B-HOY - with the third different cabin crew (although the same flight deck crew does the turnround YVR-JFK-YVR).
In the interests of my neighbour in 86C a liberal squirt of the Paul Smith cologne was applied. The tricky bit on this route is finding places and time to have showers. At the end of this segment I have four hours in Vancouver, but (according to information received on FT) no lounge access, and I'm hoping that there will be somewhere for me to freshen up in Dallas when I get there. But US lounges are so basic I'm not confident about this, even at AA's home airport. Once I get to Europe I know I will have no problem getting a shower on my two transits through Heathrow.
CX889 leaves JFK at 23:55 so there is only a supper service which I guess less than half of the people took. This time main courses were ordered from the menu and the whole meal delivered on the tray (with covers). Drinks orders were also taken individually - the trolley wasn't used at all, presumably to minimise disturbance to the many passengers going straight to sleep.
All in all CX was its usual excellent self and I fear it is downhill from here, with the next few segments being on AA 757s. I managed to take in three movies (The Quiet American, The 25th Hour and The Blues Brothers - still a good movie, but better viewed through a slightly thicker alcoholic haze I feel), listen to some old people's CDs (Fleetwood Mac, The Stones, The Eagles, ...) and get plenty of work done thanks to the laptop power.
I only have two niggles about the whole CX part of the trip:
1) the "noise cancelling" headsets are really cheap. Perhaps due to extra stringent sterilising it seems that the foam pads are disintegrating faster, leaving people with lots of black specs around their ears.
2) Why amongst the 98 CDs is there not a single one with blues music? I'm not sure CX has quite got the balance of musical tastes of its premium class customers measured quite right. And please can we have Tommy Vance back instead of that idiot "Jed the Fish" who plays tracks like "Skippity-doo-dah" (from a Walt Disney film) on what is supposedly a rock channel! Doesn't someone vet this stuff?
Next up, AA...
[This message has been edited by christep (edited 06-25-2003).]
Last edited by christep; Apr 8, 2019 at 5:40 am
Jun 25, 2003, 2:48 pm
#2
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Posts: 23,418
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by christep:
(Well actually I can think of better ways to start, but most of them involve Cathay ISMs and pearls being strewn all over the Airport Express, which I fear is one of my less likely fantasies </font>
(Well actually I can think of better ways to start, but most of them involve Cathay ISMs and pearls being strewn all over the Airport Express, which I fear is one of my less likely fantasies </font>
Look forward to reading the next installment! You'll deserve some time off in Tallinn when you get there. Great choice too - I love the place.
Jun 25, 2003, 4:16 pm
#3
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Join Date: May 1998
Location: Portland OR Double Emerald (QF and AA), DL PM/MM, Starwood Plat
Posts: 19,589
Most Admiral Clubs have showers and the DFW one definitely does (tip: the former FL is now part of the AC, seek it out at DFW). The champagne at the Wing is normally Lanson black label. They have one quite good (and cheap) red wine, an Australian shiraz (forgot the name), but their french burgundy and claret choices are awful. Usually I stick to Perrier in the Wing in order to leave room for the better wines served on board.
Good luck with the YVR transit, I still think that will be a problem. Canadian immigration is a lot more by the book than US and your routing will attract their attention.
Good luck with the YVR transit, I still think that will be a problem. Canadian immigration is a lot more by the book than US and your routing will attract their attention.
Jun 26, 2003, 7:20 am
#4
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Thanks for the tips number_6. As you will see in the second part of the report I did indeed find the old FL Arrivals lounge at DFW.
Wines are very subjective. I would venture that all the wines served in The Wing are more expensive (the only objective measure)than most people drink on a regular basis. The problem with wines is the diminishing return problem - the difference between 10 dollar wine and 100 dollar wine is in most people's taste hugely greater than the difference between 100 dollar and 190 dollar. Moreover, it seems that people who get into the habit of drinking 100 dollar bottles of wine have real difficulty then ever drinking 10 dollar wine. I find this strange personally - I am happy to have a hundred dollar meal, but I can also choose happily to have a delivery pizza; and I can also do the same with wine.
Wines are very subjective. I would venture that all the wines served in The Wing are more expensive (the only objective measure)than most people drink on a regular basis. The problem with wines is the diminishing return problem - the difference between 10 dollar wine and 100 dollar wine is in most people's taste hugely greater than the difference between 100 dollar and 190 dollar. Moreover, it seems that people who get into the habit of drinking 100 dollar bottles of wine have real difficulty then ever drinking 10 dollar wine. I find this strange personally - I am happy to have a hundred dollar meal, but I can also choose happily to have a delivery pizza; and I can also do the same with wine.