BearX220

I like BA’s Club World very much. Until this trip, thanks to kind clients and/or mileage awards, I hadn’t seen the back of the plane for years. This month, however, I was picking up a new Volvo in Gothenburg, Sweden. Volvo would pay my Economy fare. And my wife and son were meeting me in London so we could all fly home together. What the heck, I thought. World Traveller it is. I can take it. Thousands do every day. Besides, BA’s redesigned the whole thing.

8 August: I checked in around 1500 for BA048’s 1810 departure to Heathrow. Early is good. On peak summer days BA now runs two 747s through Sea-Tac, and with BA’s very modest counter space here the waiting mob can snake all through the terminal. I got 43H -- ten rows from the rear. Repaired to a quiet bar for two hours, then over to the South Satellite for boarding. Sea-Tac’s ongoing renovations have made the South Satellite a plywood jungle. BA’s usual gate, S11, had only 50-odd seats for 400 comers. The other 350 insisted on standing expectantly around the podium for close to an hour, as if the plane might vanish without them.

Boarding didn’t start until 1545 (excuse: “the crew was late”) and took a laborious half-hour. Our 747-400 had the new livery (with the South African tail art) but not the new World Traveller cabin. No wingback seats, no personal video. Hardly any BA branding evident: the headrest linens were generic lime- and cranberry-colored squares (no “World Traveller” legend) that looked like sheets of Bounty towels. It made the back of this bus look, well, like the back of a bus. A pretty shabby bus at that. Uneven seat rows, shaky tray tables still sticky from old spills, frayed fabric… I began to believe all that talk of BA no longer caring about the Economy trade.

We settled in -- for quite awhile. Poleaxed by the appearance of two BA 747s, the Seattle ground crew had catered the wrong one; our dinners were aboard the other, which wasn’t leaving for three hours. Transferring the food cost us 40 minutes. We were airborne at 1900.

Drinks arrived quickly, at least. How BA cabin staff can “beverage” a whole 747 within 45 minutes of takeoff, while it can take up to two hours aboard your average domestic UA/DL/AA 757, is a mystery. Witty, friendly, energetic FAs did their best to compensate for the below-par cabin.

Dinner was a deeply ordinary beef-in-Asian-sauce concoction on a regular tray. No “revolutionary” double-decker tray. (Surely that upgrade doesn’t depend on the plane’s facilities. Maybe it does.) No “Skyflyers” swag for the many kids aboard, either. BA promises inflight games, puzzles, Skyflyer logbooks, backpacks, etc. for the under-12 trade; this was of interest to me because my wife and five-year-old son were to follow me on this flight in four days’ time. How much of this stuff materialized tonight? Exactly none of it. (Mental note to self: call wife on landing, tell her to promise son nothing.)

I mentioned this to a purser who apologized and said the Seattle station had run low on Skyflyer goodies, so they were saved for kids in First and Club only. (Kids in First?) As we chatted I mentioned that Sea-Tac seemed a mess these days. “So is the staff!” he confided through the side of his mouth.

We gained time en route and landed LHR at 1127, three minutes ahead of scheduled gate time, but the pilot’s effort went for naught owing to ground-control problems around T4 which he described as “gridlock.” The trouble stemmed from a morning of pelting, driving rain; the sky to the west, over Windsor, was still crackling with lightning. We didn’t get to a stand until 1205, and thanks to my tailward position I didn’t deplane until 1220. My onward flight left from Gatwick at 1455 and I began to worry just a bit. Fortunately Immigration was swift (“How long will you be in the country, sir?” “If all goes well, less than three hours.”), my bag was checked through, and as I walked out of T4 a Speedlink coach pulled up right on cue.

(Note to those contemplating dishonesty. To board the bus I had only to show my LGW-GOT boarding pass and attest that I’d just arrived on a BA longhaul service. No proof required. The usual fare is GBP17.)

We lurched east along the M25 through sheets of rain, an onboard hostess struggling to serve plastic cups of lukewarm tea and making a wan effort to sell snacks from a wicker basket (pitched to the floor when we stopped short). But we made surprisingly good time and pulled up to Gatwick’s North Terminal at 1330. I found my English cousin in the BA check-in queue -- I’d recruited him to come along and split the Volvo-driving duty -- and the desk agent got us seats together for the next leg, issuing me a fresh boarding pass.

We were called to the gate for BA2784 to Gothenburg, a 737-400, at 1420 but didn’t actually board until 1500. Excuse this time: our assigned aircraft had had a cracked windshield, and it took half an hour to scrounge up an identical replacement. My cousin and I got 15B & C aboard a full flight (why are all these people going to Gothenburg on a Monday afternoon?), taxi time was quick, and we were aloft by 1535.

We got a very creditable light meal of poached salmon, potato salad and various tea cakes. My cousin’s Bloody Mary request earned him a splatter of Worcestershire sauce on his sleeve from an utterly abashed flight attendant who before landing presented him with not only a dry-cleaning voucher but a big sack of Champagne splits and vodka miniatures. No small gesture given the high cost of drinking in Sweden.

Landvetter Airport is a long, low, flat and apparently underused affair in the middle of nowhere. We hit our stand at 1815, fifteen minutes late; the only other aircraft in evidence was a chartered L-1011 bringing Swedish holidaymakers home from Thessaloniki. Unfortunately all 300+ of them and all of us from London converged simultaneously on the sole baggage belt, resulting in something of a rugby scrum, but my Lands’ End suiter appeared in due course having survived the Heathrow-Gatwick transfer. Customs was a non-event and the very efficient Gothenburg airport bus got us to our hotel by 1915.

24 August: Two weeks later, having had the fun of breaking in a well-built new car on well-built European roads, my wife, son and I left the Volvo with a shipper on the Great West Road across from Heathrow (see it in six weeks, we hope) and hopped a taxi to T4.

The prior evening I had used the BA Executive Club telephone check-in facility to confirm our travel on BA049, and it paid off in two ways. We improved our seat assignments from 44 H, J, & K to17 A, B, & C. And we dodged what looked like a 45-minute queue at T4’s World Traveller desks. Instead we proceeded as instructed to Desk 64 to get our boarding passes cut, dropped our bags off, and got to airside in eight minutes flat.

BA049 was another newly-liveried 747-400 (Chelsea Rose, this time) with the same last-generation World Traveller cabin. We pushed back just three minutes after our scheduled 1330 departure time and took off at 1400. Same equation as before: tired, grungy cabin, scant amenities, but hard-working crew doing its level best to compensate. Lunch choices were chicken Kiev or “blackened” salmon. When our FA, Trevor, leaned down to say, “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, we only have salmon left. The good news is, there is salmon for people who like salmon!” he did it so winningly that we couldn’t be indignant. The salmon -- actually with baked-on fennel/dill crust -- was fairly good, too.

Kids’ meals did materialize this time -- my son got his teatime snack in a plastic packet that turns into a pint-size attache case. Instead of the promised “games packs” full of “entertaining activity books, amusing puzzles and exciting games” from a “treasure chest” (that’s the Website talking), however, he was doled out a deck of Uno cards and a plastic brain-teaser puzzle -- neither interesting for a five-year-old -- from a dirty yellow canvas bag that looked like it’d been used to store oily rags. Still no Skyflyer log books, backpacks, etc.

We did wangle a cockpit visit high over the Canadian tundra, where my son impressed the captain and FO by correctly identifying the landing-gear lever, altimeter and autopilot switch. That’s what comes from hours with MS Flight Simulator and a 747 overlay. The captain told us Flight Sim is more difficult than flying the real thing, which cheered me. After much practice, I told him, I could land -- but not on a runway.

BA049 landed very well at SEA at 1507, a little ahead of schedule, and taxied straight to the gate. We were the first Economy pax off the plane, but it didn’t count for anything; the baggage belt didn’t start turning until 1540. How Heathrow ramp rats cope with five or six arrivals at once and routinely get your gear to the baggage hall before you, while Seattle’s seem regularly stupefied by a single international arrival, is another of life’s little mysteries.

Grades:

BA048, 8 August: a straight C. The plane was a mess, amenities were lacking, and incompetence on the ground at both ends cost us time.

BA2784, 9 August: A-. More and better food in 90 minutes than you’d get in the US in six hours, plus lavish overresponse to the Worcestershire Incident.

BA049, 24 August: B. Great staff and on-time performance count for more than the ratty, generic cabin.

The unimproved World Traveller service is so uninspired and featureless, yet apparently still so common nine months after the upgrade was announced, BA ought to just shut up about the new product until more planes are converted. Drawing attention to the new World Traveller undoubtedly disappoints more people (who, like me, note everything they’re missing) than it pleases. And the kids’ amenities -- Skyflyers -- apparently appear in completely random fashion.

I’ve seen worse in Economy across the Atlantic -- on Northwest, for one -- but on the whole, I’d rather be back in my