If you want guaranteed extra space, go for PE on either BA or AA. And if you have status, select the AC or JK seats for free and not the middle ones! If not, you can pay for these at an extra cost on BA but free on AA.

These are not long flights, especially the New York to London which often takes around 6hrs (with an hour or so built into the schedule for taxiing to the runway at a busy JFK!). I frequently travel to Japan with flight times of 14hrs or so which makes the JFK/EWR flights feel slightly longer than my annual flights to Greece!

Purchasing front row or extra leg room seats on BA is not a guarantee you will be in that seat if the aircraft type is swapped for operational reasons. On a recent flight, the aircraft was swapped from a 777-300 to a -200 2 days before the flight which inevitably led to some unhappy passengers being moved around - and one particular DYKWIA individual stormed to the galley to loudly express her outrage at being seated at the back of Club World!

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