AA133 JFK-LAX B762 N321AA
When I moved to the States from New Zealand a year ago I flew Air New Zealand, which had a reasonably generous 3 x 23 kg allowance for Business Class. I pretty much maxed it out. It was mostly clothes. I was convinced that to outlast the New York winter I was going to need every piece of winter clothing I owned, and so I packed to survive. As it turned out, although I learnt that snow was very much overrated, I didn’t die. My parents took back a whole suitcase plus of winter clothes when they came to visit for graduation. With the naivety of youth, and the foolish optimism created by the presence of a Y chromosome, I was quietly confident that I would be able to fit the remnants of my wardrobe and everything else I’d accumulated throughout the year into my one remaining suitcase and bag.
Up until this trip, I’d thought that the only people who ever reached the 32 kg upper limit per bag imposed by most airlines were rock smugglers. I couldn’t even see why anyone would be foolish enough to pack a 32 kg suitcase. In fact I don’t think I’ve even managed to lift anything coming near 32 kgs. Well, nothing that didn’t breathe anyway. And even that didn’t end well.
My suitcase ended up topping the scales at an eye-watering 35 kgs. That’s 76 lbs in imperial, and way overweight by any unit of measurement. The skycap who was shepherding my bags for me at T8 told me some of it had to come out. Thankfully, my other bag was well under in the mid-fifties, and so it was just a matter of transferring enough stuff from one bag to the other, though it was slightly embarrassing being one of those people who hold everyone else up in the line because when they get to the front they are pinged for packing the entire contents of their life into a suitcase. My one consolation was that because I had decided to tip the skycap $5 to carry my bags for me instead of paying the evil SmarteCarte trolley vending bay $5 to carry my bags myself, I was using the AA curbside check-in/bag drop, meaning that the only witnesses to my embarrassment were AA employees.
While I was fumbling with the locks on my now 70lb-compliant suitcase and rescuing a pair of socks which had tried to escape during the Great Transfer, the skycap came back with my passport, bag checks and boarding passes... to Melbourne. I pointed out I was transiting to Auckland. Oh, says the skycap, let me go back to the agent.
The check-in agent was a bleached blonde lady smacking on some gum. She was not pleased when she was informed that, after all her hard work getting the computer to spit out bag tags to Melbourne, that I actually wanted my suitcases to end up in Auckland. In fact, the look she gave me suggested that she had a lot of personal problems in her life and I’d caused every one of them. (Though to be fair, I think CX’s creaking old system has to take its share of the blame here for delinking the MEL-AKL segment and plonking it somewhere else in the ticket; the QF agents in LAX had the same problem when they tried to issue me my MEL-AKL boarding pass in LAX).
Dramas with the overweight bag and bag labelling aside, I was quite impressed with the curbside check-in service. Plenty of skycaps to help with bags, and there was no wait at all. I had to go past the premium check in area on my way to security and the queue there was about five deep with only two or three counters open. It seemed like quite a slick operation.
Because I was travelling in First I was entitled to Priority AAccess, which basically means fast track security. Is it just me or does anyone else find AA’s habit of doubling the vowel every time it appears incredibly naff? I mean, I’m all for branding, but AA just seem to take it a little too far. Still, I suppose we should be grateful they don’t call themselves AAmericAAn AAirlines, though who knows, maybe it’s coming. As an enhAAncement.
The Priority AAccess line was long, but nowhere near as long as the regular line which had spilled out of the tensalined area into the main check-in corridor. There were two TSA agents handling the priority line, though they did seem to be inspecting documents and taking more time with each passenger than has been my experience. A team leader opened up a third checkpoint where I was near the front of the queue and I was through pretty quickly, thankfully managing to avoid the millimetre wave detector along the way.
My flight today was leaving from gate 41 over on the midfield concourse. I knew there was an Admirals’ Club (or is that AAdmirals’ Club?) both in the main terminal and in the concourse, but I thought that because I was connecting to an international First flight that I got Flagship Lounge access. The Flagship Lounge shares space with the main terminal Admirals’ Club so it was there where I headed.
Transcon First passengers with no non-AA oneworld status don’t normally get lounge access unless they are either in a full fare bucket (F or Z) or connecting to an international flight. I showed my onward boarding pass at the desk, and the agent reminded me that my flight left from the midfield concourse and that I could choose to stay here and head over a bit earlier or head to the midfield Club now. Seeing as I was already there, and I was going to have to get up and leave no matter which club I went to now, I chose to stay put.
I was a bit puzzled when I walked right past a keycoded door marked Flagship Lounge, as the agent hadn’t indicated that I needed anything to get in. I doubled back with the intention of checking whether I had AC or FL access, but all the agents were busy and after hovering for a bit decided just to pull up the access policy on my phone to check before potentially making a fool of myself. The AA site was a bit vague with respect to oneworld international First flights but did note that passengers travelling on AA First or Business had access to the AC on their domestic connections. I didn’t have that long at the airport, maybe about an hour, so I decided not to bother going back to the desk.
As domestic lounges go the AC was nice enough. It wasn’t too heaving, and pretty spacious with comfortable windowside seating overlooking the approach to runway 13L and the midfield concourse. I knew that I was going to be fed pretty well over the next day and a half by Qantas, so food and beverage wasn’t a huge deal for me. Which was probably a good thing, since like all US (country, not airline) lounges, the F&B offerings were pretty abysmal. Chocolate chip cookies. Apples. Pretzel mix. And, in a move I found incredibly tacky, food for purchase. I suppose it stops people from bringing in outside food (or going outside to get food) but I still found it incredibly downmarket for an airline lounge. Then again, I come from a part of the world where the domestic club lounge has a fridge containing something like thirty types of beer. For free. So put it down to culture shock.
However, seeing as AA went to the effort of catering pretzel mix, I felt it would be rude not to partake.
Getting to the midfield concourse at T8 is painless. It involves going down a very long escalator, walking a short distance in an underground passageway featuring some cool mood lighting, and then going up another very long escalator which ejected me right by gate 41. From the looks of things boarding had just commenced, as the priority AAccess line was still quite long.
AA’s 767-200 First cabin is made up of two rows of 2-1-2. The first row is row 2 and the second row is row 3. Why, I have no idea. While 2D (the middle seat in the first row) came highly recommended – the so-called Captain Kirk seat – I like my windows, so went for a right hand window in the second row. I originally chose this based on the FEBO method that AA uses for meal service, but on a quick visual comparison after boarding I thought it had been a wise choice. The way the seats are configured row 3 actually gets four windows, because row 2’s third window is behind the seat in the upright position (just as the sixth window in the cabin is sandwiched in between the row 3 seat and the J bulkhead). For those of you who do better with pictures than words, see fig. 1:
The only difference is that on the plane I was on, the windows were actually all the same size, as you can kind of see in this boarding shot. Actually you probably can't see it at all, because there's only one window in view, but it shows General Cabin Ambiance and I understand that is important to get across when writing a trip report:
The cabin and flight went out full. My seatmate was a very well put together Asian American lady who spent the duration of the flight reading her James Patterson novel and watching The Lincoln Lawyer on her personal entertainment unit. She didn’t eat, she didn’t drink, she didn’t talk. In other words, given I wasn’t feeling terribly sociable, she was the perfect seatmate.
The purser came by to take our orders for preflight drinks: water, juice or sparkling wine. The usual things followed: boarding was completed, someone’s carry on wouldn’t fit into the overhead locker, the door closed, the plane pushed back. The safety video played. And then they played it again. In Spanish. Since I don’t speak any Spanish other than “por favor mantengase alejado de las puertas” – the result of a family holiday to Disney World in a bygone time when joy and cheer was spread throughout domestic flights by way of free food in coach – it left me free to tune out and soak in the last glimpses of New York outside my window.
After takeoff the purser came by to welcome us individually, take drinks orders and delivered personal entertainment units. This was followed by the obligatory hot towel service. I took a photo of the hot towel. I have a vague recollection that the reason why I did this was because I thought it might be interesting to compare the various sizes and quality of the hot towels across the different OW airlines I’d be flying on. In the light of day, I agree it was a fairly stupid idea, but since I took the photo and this is the only place where I’d actually be able to post it without getting strange looks, I might as well share.
The purser was a pleasant enough guy though I found him a bit abrupt at first – for example, when I told him that my PEU was acting up (the screen would go white while the audio kept playing) he simply beckoned for me to hand over the unit without saying a word. I thought maybe he had a bet on with the other flight attendant (who I think spoke once, to describe the bread basket) as to who could get through the flight saying the least. Or maybe he could tell that I was the sort of person who might ask him strange questions about the registration number or the ratio of meal choices loaded on board. Or perhaps he just couldn’t understand a word I was saying, which was also possible given that every time I said something to him during the flight the inevitable response was a cupped ear and a “say again?”
He gave the unit a few good whacks with a mallet in the galley (or the technological equivalent), but whatever he did with it made it work again, which was all I – and probably he - really cared about. The various plugs and sockets on the AA seat weren’t in the most intuitive place – at least not to me - but this is where some surreptitious spying over at the seatmate’s unit and trailing wires came in handy. There was a fairly decent list of movies on the unit, and by decent I mean long, because half of them I hadn’t ever heard of before. I settled on No Strings Attached, which had the twofold advantage of (a) being something mindless about which I wouldn’t have to do any thinking about the plot; and (b) Natalie Portman.
Menus followed shortly after. Today our meal would be a “Dining Service”:
To Start
Warm mixed nuts
or
Marinated cheese antipasto
Bread Basket
Assorted gourmet breads
Appetizer
Prosciutto garnished with Parmesan cheese,
served with cantaloupe puree
The Salad Cart
Fresh seasonal greens offered with sour cream
and herb dressing or premium extra virgin olive oil
and balsamic vinegar
Mozzarella, cherry tomato and fresh basil salad
Sliced rosemary thyme chicken breast
Main Course
Chateaubriand with Demi-Glace
Salt and pepper fillet of beef enhanced by
a shallot and caper demi-glace, served with
mashed potatoes, carrots squash and red onion
An American Classics item
Lemon Caper Salmon
Salmon topped with a light lemon caper sauce,
served with orzo pasta and grilled zucchini
Four Cheese Ravioli
Ravioli pasta filled with four cheeses,
accented by herbed wild mushroom cream sauce
Dine Upon Request
You may choose one of the featured entrees
for your Dine Upon Request selection, presented
all at once, at any time you wish during the flight.
Dessert
Ice Cream Sundae
Vanilla ice cream with a choice of hot fudge,
butterscotch or seasonal berry toppings,
whipped cream and pecans
Grand Marnier Fruit Salad
Fruit and berries with a light Grand Marnier syrup
Light Refreshment
Freshly baked on board cookies
Drinks were delivered with the warmed nuts for which American carriers are renowned all trip report forums over, and even though the menu presented a choice between nibbles the purser was happy to offer a choice of both. The cheese looked more like marinated vegetables, and since I’m not a fan of either I opted only for the nuts to go with my ginger ale.
The purser’s helper came out with the trays and then the bread basket, which was more a bread tray, but had white, wheat or cheese on offer with a choice of butter or olive oil. I’m sure you’ve all seen a cheese roll before, yet I still feel strangely compelled to include a photo.
Because such things matter, I noted that the bread was warm. Next up was the appetizer. Since I hadn’t read the menu all that carefully, I was a bit puzzled to see that it came with what looked like a dish of mashed up carrots on the side, but it all turned out to be very tasty.
I hate tomatoes. Actually, I hate a lot of things, but tomatoes are at the top of the list. I hate the way that sandwich makers seem to regard the tomato as some sort of finishing ingredient required in every sandwich. I hate how they make their presence known in every meal. And I hate how you can boil them, roast them, cook them or nuke them, and yet they just won’t die.
Some people fail to understand my hatred of tomatoes. They ask why I can’t just pick out the tomato and continue with my life.
The reason is because tomatoes are evil.
I mention this not only to recruit new members for the fight against this horrible red fruit, but also to explain why the following photograph of my salad has no sight, no glimpse, no
godforsaken trace of the tomato mentioned on the menu. The purser asked whether I wanted the tomato topping. I think I might have clocked my seatmate waving my arms about in protest.
While I was smugly celebrating my win against the fruit of evil, the purser’s helper offered another round of bread and spreads. I went for the white roll this time, just because I could.
The salad was very nice. So far I was quite impressed with AA’s catering. I’ve had worse food on some Asian carriers. And it was blowing the socks off the United p.s. meal I’d had on the way to New York (which was admittedly in Business, but I had the impression, correct me if I’m wrong, that there wasn’t much difference in catering between p.s. J and p.s. F).
The purser came by to take orders for the entrees next. Remember I said earlier that I chose my seat based in part on FEBO? Well, this was where the advantage was supposed to kick in, because orders started with 3D, then to us in 3HJ. The only problem was that all of the choices on the menu sounded fine. Equally fine, in fact. And I couldn’t make up my mind about what to have. I actually agonised over my choice for five minutes when the menus were first handed out. And managed to change my mind between all three options at least twice for each choice.
Seeing as I was completely incapable of making a decision, I did the only sensible thing I could. I threw it into the hands of fate.
Me to purser: ”I’m happy to take the least popular choice, so if you want to go around and take everyone else’s orders first and come back to me, that’s fine with me.”
Purser: “Say again?”
I repeated myself, and he seemed slightly bemused that I would want to relinquish my hard fought for FEBO seat choice in this manner, but after double checking (“are you sure?”) he said thank you and went about the rest of the cabin. Of course, it all came to nought in the end since he came back to tell me that he had all three choices available, forcing me to make a decision on the spot.
I’d had chateaubriand the last time I flew AA First. It was on that same holiday to Disney World I’d mentioned earlier. I wasn’t a very good flyer back then. Turbulent weather upset me. And I don’t mean upset me in that I got scared, or started crying, but that air pockets and my stomach didn’t really get along. Or put another way, air pockets and my stomach and the barf bag in the seat pocket
did get along. Too well.
The flight was Chicago to Seattle. Chicago was under an ATC slowdown due to bad weather. I realise that is normal operations for Chicago, but I vaguely recall some sort of snowstorm. It might even have been a blizzard. I really don’t know, because where I come from it doesn’t snow. At least not in Auckland. For those of you who aren’t sure of New Zealand’s geography, that’s in the north bit of the North Island. When I made the same comment to the graduate affairs advisor at the university where I was doing my LLM, she couldn’t understand this, because “in the US the further north you go the colder it gets, so it seems so strange that it’s the other way round where you come from.”
Needless to say I didn’t get a whole lot of useful guidance from my office of graduate affairs.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with my meal choice. Just that the last time I’d had chateaubriand on AA it didn’t exactly stay down. In fact I think I became reacquainted with it – not in a pleasant way - somewhere over Boise. A place which the world only now knows about because it was where Sarah Palin got her higher education.
So, of course, I elected for the beef. This seemed to be a cue for the purser to start a round of Twenty Questions.
Purser: “How would you like it cooked?”
Me (thinking: what, another decision? I just had to make a bloody decision and now you want me to make another one?): “Medium.”
Purser: “Medium on the side of rare, or medium on the side of well done?”
Me (wondering why I couldn’t just get it medium on the side of medium): “Er, medium well, thanks”.
To the crew’s credit, they did a pretty good job:
Sadly as neighbour 3H wasn’t eating, I didn’t get to spy on any of the other mains. On the upside, that meant no risk of food envy.
After the entree plates were cleared out rolled the dessert cart. An ice cream sundae might not show much imagination as a dessert option, but you can pretty much never go wrong with it. I’m not sure where the seasonal berry toppings were that were promised on the menu – they might have escaped over to the other glass being offered with Grand Marnier – but the hot fudge and nuts suited me fine. Just so you know, in addition to hating tomatoes I also hate whipped cream. At least as a dessert ingredient.
The rest of the flight was uneventful. Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher had the inevitable happy ending, and seeing as I had a rather long wait ahead of me at LAX decided to try and catch a quick catnap. AA provide a very nice pillow and light quilt at every seat, and although I found the seat recline a bit odd in that it seemed to dip very low to the floor with a flat non-tilting seat pan, I still managed to catch about an hour’s sleep.
The crew began tidying up the cabin about an hour out of LA, collecting unused entertainment units and then serving the pre-arrival beverage.
Pre-Arrival Beverage
For Your Enjoyment Chilled sparkling or still water with a fresh citrus garnish
Read: fizzy water with lemon.
It wasn’t long after that before desert gave way to suburbia, and then to more built up areas as we crept closer to Los Angeles. Our approach was from the east, so I had a good view of downtown Los Angeles all the way to touchdown, including over a couple of highways which I love swooping over on a descending aircraft. We landed about 30 minutes ahead of schedule, although about 10 minutes of our early arrival was eaten into as we first waited to cross runway 25R (we had landed on the outer runway) and then to power down and wait for a tug into our gate 42B. Not that it bothered me, since an early arrival still equated to the same amount of waiting time for me; the only difference was whether I would be doing that waiting on board the plane or in the lounge.
I was actually quite impressed with AA’s transcon product. The meal was much better than I had expected, both in terms of quantity and quality, and the electronic recliner was a more than adequate product for a five hour daytime flight. The service, although not sparkling, was polished and efficient. As a plane geek I left the flight happy (although the prospect of an upcoming A380 ride might have had a bit to do with that). As a normal human being I wanted to get back on the first flight to New York, which I was missing already.
Next: the AA Flagship Lounge and the LAX transit experience.