January 26, 2005
Singapore to London
British Airways First Class * Dinner - Breakfast
747-400 G-BNLB Seat 2A
1120p-555a Flight time: 13:21
Although the gate lounge was empty, I arrived back in the First Class cabin to find ten out of the fourteen suites occupied. Good. It’ll be nice to have some company. Hopefully some of those seats will also be filled with full fare paying passengers whose money might someday contribute to an upgrade in BA’s inflight entertainment system. With airlines like Cathay Pacific and Singapore setting the standard, BA’s small screens and lack of an on-demand system are sorely in need of an upgrade.
As much as I’d prefer a daytime departure for this marathon flight across some of Asia’s most exotic locales, the late night departure is well timed to reduce jetlag. Over the course of this thirteen-hour flight, most passengers choose to start with a full dinner, followed by a good night’s sleep, awaking in time for a leisurely breakfast before landing in Heathrow at the start of the day.
I think this sounds fine if you’re originating in Singapore. For those of us originating out of Melbourne however, it’s difficult to get up for a big meal when your time zone says it’s almost 3:00am, which it will be by the time the aircraft has leveled off and service begins. Thankfully, BA’s First Class meal service is tailored to meet your demands. If you want your dinner at 4:00am local time, the crew will be happy to serve you then. So it was that I reclined my seat soon after take off and slept quite soundly for the next six and a half hours.
When I awoke, we were somewhere over India or Pakistan – I couldn’t tell for sure because every time I looked at the SkyMap, the figures were in Chinese. Oh well, it wasn’t that important. After all, it was totally black out my window with daylight still many hours away. From my watch I noticed that we’d been in flight for almost seven hours so there were still about six and a half to go. It was time for dinner.
Prior to calling it a night out of Singapore, I’d given my menu preferences to the purser, a wonderfully engaging lady named Marie. She informed me that the entree would take about a half-hour to prepare so when I awoke, just let the crew know and they’d get right on it. Following is the menu transcript. If this doesn’t get some of you late night readers feeling like a midnight snack, I don’t know what will …
Singapore to London
DINNER
Appetizers
Blue crab and mango salad with chermoula dressing
Smoked meats with Parmesan cheese
Soup
Roast Tomato Soup
Salad
Fresh salad leaves with your choice of Balsamic Vinaigrette or Caesar dressing
MAIN COURSE
Roast Loin of Lamb
Presented with Lyonnaise potatoes and white beans au gratin
Sautéed Chicken
Served with braised peas, caramelized bacon and potatoes au gratin
Szechuan Prawns
Served atop fried rice and accompanied by Chinese Cabbage
Peppered Smoked Salmon
Offered with a grilled vegetable salad served with crème fraiche and herbs
LIGHTER FARE
Bacon Roll served with tomato ketchup
Stuffed potato skins
Roast tomato soup with a side salad
Fresh Pasta topped with your choice of chilli, fennel and tomato sauce or green pesto
A selection of finger sandwiches
A selection of cheese and fruit
** ***** **
DESSERT AND CHEESE
Lemon and Raspberry Sorbet
Presented with tuile biscuits
Ginger Cheesecake
Served with marmalade coulis
A Selection of Classic Cheeses
Selection of Fresh Fruit
Chocolates
When my order was initially being taken on the ground in Singapore, I’d asked about the contents of the meat and cheese appetizer, whereupon Purser Marie quickly visited the galley and returned with a pre-plated example. It was basically a large portion of sliced pork accompanied by a small amount of Parmesan cheese shavings.
I decided to start with the crab and mango appetizer, an excellent choice as it turned out. The crab was presented in a delicious mayonnaise based salad and was augmented quite nicely by little squares of sweet mango. The Chermoula dressing was as delicious as it was subtle and I think I could have easily had another two or three servings of it and left the meal at that.
It’s worth noting that I also had
this appetizer on last year’s flight out of Singapore and it was nowhere near as nicely presented. The crab was served raw and presented in a pile in the middle of the plate.
As much as I enjoyed the crab appetizer, the highlight of this meal was the sautéed chicken. The chicken was moist and tender, surrounded by peas and mushrooms in the most delicious sauce. It was without question one of the finest meals I’ve ever had with BA.
Dessert was the Lemon and Raspberry Sorbet, presented with tuile biscuits. I had the ginger cheesecake last year and I wanted to try something a bit lighter. Also, I was curious – what in tarnation is a tuile biscuit?! Well, it’s a light and crispy pastry bowl with a layer of chocolate in the bottom. Inside each shell were scoops of sorbet. This, as well as the meal, I washed down copious quantities of coffee and water.
Later, I fired up the trusty laptop, tossed in Philip Aaberg’s excellent CD
High Plains, and set to work composing this Flight Report. Before long, we were over Austria and one of the Flight Attendants appeared to inquire whether or not I’d like to have breakfast. I looked at my watch and was shocked to see that it had been almost five hours since I’d finished dinner! Wherever did the time get to? Meanwhile, the FA stood patiently at my seat, his professionalism preventing him from drumming his fingers or otherwise disturbing my little reverie. Oh, right! Breakfast! Uh, yeah, sure! How about a smoothie and a plate with the works. Would that be the English Breakfast then, Sir? That’s the one. Oh – and some more coffee too, please.
BA’s Classic British Breakfast plate is a full plate of food, highlighted by a nice sized serving of scrambled eggs, a rasher of bacon, two big sausages, a pile of mushroom caps, a broiled tomato half and a portion of hashed browns. Add to this the bottomless cup of BA’s excellent coffee and a nice variety of warmed breakfast breads (including flaky croissants) and you’ve got one of the finest egg breakfasts served aloft.
By the way, for those of you jonesin’ for the breakfast menu transcript – here it is:
BREAKFAST
Starters
Chilled fruit juice
An energizing fruit smoothie
A selection of fruit, plain yogurts and cereals
Fresh seasonal fruit plate
From The Baker
A wide selection of breakfast pastries and rolls
MAIN COURSE
The Classic British Breakfast
Scrambled eggs, mushrooms, tomato, sausage and bacon
Chive Omelet
Apple Cinnamon Pancakes
Served with your choice of:
Espresso, cappuccino, coffee, decaffeinated coffee, tea or herbal tea
Soon, the Captain came on over the PA system to wish us all a good morning and inform us that we were now three hundred miles and forty minutes from landing at Heathrow. I looked at my watch again. 5:15am London time. 4:15pm in Melbourne. Amazing… It had been twenty-three hours since we’d taken off from Melbourne. Not counting the hour and forty minutes on the ground in Singapore, I’d been sitting in this aircraft for over twenty-one hours!
Usually, I think of long flights in terms of nine to thirteen hours. Then you get off that flight and perhaps connect to a shorter flight. Barring around the world flight numbers, when you consider the distance traveled on a single flight number, these Australia to London flights have to be amongst the very longest in the world. Ten thousand, five hundred and ten miles. I wonder if Singapore's EWR-SIN nonstop keeps the same flight number and continues on to somewhere beyond Singapore?
The lack of daylight reminded me once again that it’s the middle of winter up here in the Northern Hemisphere. Flying on this same flight in April, you get to enjoy dawn’s early light over the last hour and a half of the flight. This time however, the entire thirteen-hour flight was made in complete darkness. Only the far northern and southern extremes of the planet suffer that much continuous darkness in a day, and then only during the winter months. As consolation however, we were treated to the lights of London as we made a long, sweeping turn around the city before lining up and touching down softly on one of Heathrow’s many runways.
One of the nicer benefits of flying First Class with British Airways into London is the Fast Track service through Immigration and the Arrivals Lounge. Because there was not even one person in line ahead of me at Immigration, I breezed through there like Aeolus and was on my way to a refreshing shower at the Arrivals Lounge moments later.
When it comes to shower facilities, The Terminal 4 Arrivals Lounge is very well equipped to deal with the glut of early morning arrivals from North America and the rest of the world. The lounge provides over thirty private shower rooms, each of them equipped with the fabulous Pharo-Hansrohe Body Jet Hydrotherapy Shower. As advertised, these remarkable showers will “
wash off the day and give your muscles and mind the benefits of an intense cleansing and toning aqua-massage. Adjustable body jets pummel you from all angles and combine with the aromatic lather of Molton Brown Travel Reviving Shampoo & Shower Gel to leave you fully revitalized and with a sense of total wellbeing”.
Well… I did try out the adjustable body jets, and while I wouldn’t really say I was “pummeled”, I did get good and wet. As for the
Molton Brown Travel Reviving Shampoo & Shower Gel, I felt more cleaned than revived, but then perhaps the shampoo was designed only to truly revive people who’d flown in on the shorter, trans-Atlantic flights. In all fairness to Molton-Brown, I don’t believe there’s a shampoo made that can fully revive anyone from the twenty four-hour marathon that is BA 18. In any event, I emerged into the lounge with a yawn but a reasonably improved sense of well being as well. A couple of cups of coffee helped immensely and by the time I left at 9:00am, I was feeling pretty good about life in general.
Once again, British Airways had delivered a stellar service, from check-in at Melbourne to a post flight shower at the Molton-Brown Spa. From a First Class perspective, other airlines may offer wider seats, more extensive menus or better lounges. BA’s real strength, I think, lies in the quality of their crew. I can’t imagine a better trained, more dedicated, capable and caring group of people. They’ve all been just great so far and contribute mightily to BA’s maintaining its perennial status amongst the world’s best airlines.
HOLIDAY INN M4
Although I’d planned to visit friends out in Bracknell Forest, they were out of town until the next day. As such, I’d reserved a room at the
Holiday Inn out on M4. As booked via Priceline.com, this room cost me $72.00 USD, quite a savings over the advertised rack rate of over £102.00 or about $190.00 USD.
I’d read somewhere that single travelers are often accommodated in comparatively tiny rooms at British Hotels, so I informed the front desk clerk that Seat 2B would be joining me later this evening, that is if she didn’t miss her flight from Khartoom. I was subsequently assigned a nice sized room up on the fifth floor highlighted by a huge King sized bed and a large, modern bathroom that included a real bath. Out my window, I had a decent, if distant view of Heathrow that included a view of Terminal 5, the new 8 Billion-dollar home to British Airways beginning in 2008. Read all about this new terminal
HERE.
Also worth of note was the in-room mini-bar, conveniently stocked with a variety of beverages and snack foods. Like all mini-bars, their convenience came at an exorbitantly high cost. A small bottle of water cost £3.00, beers £5.00-6.00, etc. Just double those figures for US costs. I reckon these mini-bars are fine for the Russell Crowes of the world who can afford to blow $14,000.00 a night on exclusive Beverly Hills bungalows during the Academy Awards but for a budget traveler like myself, they are little more than an expensive room decoration.
Outside my window, light drizzle was the hallmark of a typical winter day in London. Oh well, it’d be a good day to relax in the hotel, catch up on this report and, above all else, get a good night’s sleep.
Early in the afternoon, I ventured down to main floor to check out the dining and entertainment options. There was a good looking Irish Pub that didn’t open until 6:00pm. Next to it was an equally nice looking restaurant that similarly wouldn’t open until later. That left the Rotisserie Restaurant and the bar/lounge. A large sign outside The Rotisserie touted a luncheon buffet for only £14.65. Let’s see now, that’s … $28.00!! For a lunch buffet?! Where’s a Royal Fork when you need one?! I did a quick about face and headed over to the bar/lounge where I purchased a cheeseburger for the comparatively bargain basement price of just £9.00. To be sure, it was a pretty good burger but a $17.00 burger it wasn’t.
Following an exciting BBC special about moss formations in New Guinea or something like that, I lapsed into blissful unconsciousness that lasted from about 5:00pm until 6:00am the next morning.