champair79

The aircraft that operated the repatriation flight yesterday was G-YMMC. That is (or was...) a LGW-based 772. LGW had a subfleet of recently refurbished RR 772 aircraft so distance is not an issue. The GE ones couldn’t operate it due to lack of crew rest facilities.

champ

siw

As I mentioned in the first post I was suprised that a B777-200ER could fly such a long distance from LHR-DPS with a cabin full of passengers (I guess there was luggage but no cargo in the bellyhold). The wikipedia page says the longest regular B777-200ER route is (was) UA EWR-DEL. When GA did the LHR-DPS with a B77W (non First Class seat configuration) and later with the A330-900neo then a fuel stop was made at KNO (Indonesia's most north-western major city/airport). The only time I have flown on BA long haul was LHR-BKK-LHR last year. It was in WT on an old B772 (tiny, low resolution IFE). The two worst flights I have experienced and I will never do that again. So I would not envy anyone flying BA WT LGW-DPS on a B772 for a holiday - if that ever route ever happens or holidays are allowed ever again.

Airprox

It can make it when you only use 65% of the seats. The real issue is the flight back against the winds, and for that you can't bring much along with you at all. Remember that the runway at DPS is also 600 metres shorter than either DEL or KNO.

TraumaDoc

Of course the 772 that flew the route yesterday was a refurbished model with the Panasonic IFE - the best in the fleet. Although 10 abreast in economy they're nice enough to fly.

The old 772s are absolutely horrible in WT (and most other cabins to be fair). Whilst I've not been paying a huge amount of attention to the future fleet guesswork, I'd imagine they won't hang around for long in the post-covid world.

araqnid

The LHR-BKK-LHR route for next April comes up as being served by a B787-9, although that might be just optimism this far out. Not sure which other routes those old 772s were serving.

Sam Bee

GA did fly non-stop LHR-DPS-CGK-LHR for a period on their 77W, but easy for that to get lost in the fog of the myriad of schedule changes. They flew LHR-DPS-CGK with the 77W, but the issue was leaving Bali you'd have to fly an early morning 737 to CGK to connect with the 77W CGK-LHR. So many bad decisions. You can't fly DPS-LHR on anything with passengers due to the runway length. when they switched to LHR-KNO-DPS-KNO-LHR it started with the older 332's before moving onto only a few rotations on the new A339 before the route was canned (last few flights even reverted to 77W's). The decision for that routing was partly political to promote tourism into North Sumatra - but then they averaged about 3 people getting on / off in Medan. Last time I flew it I was the only pax in J which was amazing (of course, another 10 mates of cabin crew / self proclaimed VIP's were moved into J over the flight - I couldn't whinge though as my upgrade wasn't paid for).

BA staff WERE in Jakarta to look at setting up an opening up a flight when GA were operating LHR-CGK-SIN-LHR rotations, but it was never clear what became of that - or if it was an intended add-on to the Singapore terminator. Always worth keeping an eye on BA for Indonesia routes as they had some good fares that allowed add-ons on 3K/JQ/SQ/MH/MI and domestically on GA.