Originally Posted by
brunos
It is 1:50 block time indeed, but 1:30 actual flight time per FR24.
I have taken the BA flights a few times years ago in J and service was excellent. Same from CDG (all pre-covid).
I would not be excited to take that AF LHR-NCE bird. No food to be had or purchased at that time of the day is silly.
Indeed, "in the air" flight time on LHR_NCE is typically 1.30-1.35 (sometimes 1.40) depending on how lucky you are with the wind on the day. Funnily enough, block time on BA tends to be 2.05 which makes me wonder if BA pads schedules more or if runway taxiing is shorter from T3 (I'll admit I never checked till now despite flying from LHR dozens of times and LHR-NCE nearly every week but always from T5 from now).
Sadly for this specific route, BA C has returned to pre-covid catering so we lost the hot meal in favour of the tiny salad (a couple of nice ones like the poke bowl but many very mediocre ones, and worse, the nasty afternoon tea for afternoon flights and "brunch" in the mid mornings). In Y, it is crisps and a bottle of water so not great.
The phrasing is indeed the reason why I started this thread and what worried me, but also the fact that I don't know if lazy AF will bother creating catering contracts for European type sandwiches for those planes that only fly those routes for two months. The planes are clearly ORY-based aircrafts thouvh the glimmer of hope is that they seem to mostly fly the European routes in the day and often start at NCE or TLS or MRS it seems. all of which can provide perfectly reasonable and competitively prices sandwiches should AF decide to, but indeed, my prognostic errs on the negative side.
As you say, it would be silly as the flight times are 17.35-20.30 but by nature, NCE serves a fairly broad area so it would not be unusual for people to have another hour transport before reaching destination, for instance when people are headed to the St Tropez area or the Liguria coast and I'd expect that they will be bloody hungry by the time they arrive!!
The Aspire lounge described in the lounge thread looks ok but not great, but thankfully, I can access the Amex Centurion lounge in T3 which should have better offerings so might try and arrive a bit earlier to have my own conception of afternoon tea (ie a normal meal with no tea anywhere in sight!) before flying but that of course is based on hope security is not too horrid (I presume that AF has no fast track for Platinum as they were unwilling to pay for it at T4 already unless flying C).
Anyway, if no final confirmation comes before I fly, I will report back on this thread next week!