My 16 year old cousin is about to visit me in London, flying internationally for the first
time, on BA. He's very excited and I thought that it'd be interesting to hear people's memories of their first ever flight with the airline.
For me, it was in 1993. I was 10. Growing up in Trinidad I was something of an aviation buff. Seeing the BA 747-236 in the old Landor livery, utterly dominating the apron at Piarco at the end of the twice weekly LGW-BGI-POS service had always been thrilling but I'd no expectations of actually getting to fly on it (my parents were young and broke and the only flying I'd done up till then was the 10minute domestic turboprop hop to Tobago).
Life took an unexpected turn after my mother won a postgraduate scholarship to study in The Hague for a year and saved enough of her stipend to fund a two week visit so I could see something of Europe. Talk about thrilling! I spent three months counting down the days to the trip in November.
On the day itself the inbound flight was late, fuelling a private fear that this was all too good to be true and I wouldn't actually be going anywhere. It was a relief when it glided in eventually, a mass of red lights and un PC engine roars. In those days there were no jetways in POS. I still remember my heart thudding as I walked across the tarmac in the dark accompanied by a BA crew member (was flying as a UM), the outlines of my dad and other relatives who'd come to see me off visible against the glaring light of the waving gallery above us.
Three things stood out. The huge illuminated tail fin, looking glorious against the night sky; that weird metallic whine you only hear when you're close to an aircraft and the massive engines. To my alarm the turbofans were turning slowly, presumably to keep the lights and aircon powered, but I wasn't prepared for it and pretty much darted up the stairs. A couple of years before this a mentally disturbed American man had died after climbing into the engine of a BA 747 preparing to taxi at Piarco, a sad event covered extensively by the local media that led to a few childhood nightmares, and even now plane engines fill me with a sort of fascinated dread.
The plane left two hours late due to a tech issue (causing my dad a sleepless night I later discovered) but on board the whole thing flashed by, I was too busy drinking in the other passengers, FAs etc. We eventually took off for BGI where there was a change of crew and my seat mates, an elderly Swiss couple boarded. Spent the rest of the time messing around with the young flyer pack BA used to give to kids and then fell asleep for hours.
Landing at LGW where I was to connect to Amsterdam was a shock. It sounds silly but I'd grown up associating the 747 with BA. It simply hadn't occurred to me the airline had other aircraft types or would have so many of them. More seriously I finally realised there was this vast interconnected world out there filled with all types of people making their way around it (by design my childhood had been pretty sheltered; almost nothing in the way of TV and no video games and I hadn't given 'abroad' much thought).
Shortly after my return to Trinidad BA discontinued the flight (now since resumed on the 777 at far greater frequencies). At the time I assumed that'd be the end of my experience with the airline but in 96 my mother was offered a job in London and we flew on the classic one last time to start our new lives in the metropolis (this time boarding from Barbados). Since then I've flown the airline probably more than two hundred times, in all four cabins, as well as many other carriers. No other flying experience has matched the level of excitement of that first red eye though.