What meal service on this flight??
 

I'm flying DL business class from JFK to TLV on a 777. The flight leaves JFK at midnight and arrives at 5:30pm. Do they actually serve dinner at 2am?? Normally, the pre-arrival meal is breakfast - what do they serve at 4pm - dinner again??

After takeoff, you get the full D1 dinner service. Before landing in TLV you get a breakfast (eggs, coffee, juice, fruit), or a mediocre sandwich.

Like more D1 flights, the pre-arrival meal isn't anything great, but the D1 dinner after takeoff is the full service, even though it's 1 AM.

Why is it such a hard and fast rule that the full service always has to be the first? In the case of this flight's scheduling, it would make much more sense to offer a quick single tray after take-off and let everyone get to sleep at a reasonable hour. Then take the full meal that's currently served at 2 am and instead begin the full service about 3 hours prior to landing in TLV, by which point most passengers are awake already and have no interest in sleeping any further, so they can actually choose to enjoy the meal instead of rushing through it at 2 am.

That would make a lot more sense, but I'm sure it's not the case.

The flight originates in SFO, leaving there at 2pm - so for those people, it's really only 9pm when the flight to TLV leaves - dinner makes more sense for them. But for the JFK people, it's rather insane to eat a big dinner at 2am.

P.S. - I called Delta - and there are 3 food services: Dinner, snack & "Supper". Apparently, there are 2 dinners served - one full and one "pre-arrival supper".

I ask similar questions about the reverse flight as we are scheduled to fly TLV-JFK tomorrow. I'm assuming that the same thing will be true; they'll serve full dinner after take off even though it will be midnight and then breakfast before landing at JFK? Frankly, with 12 hours of flying, I might actually want a snack somewhere in the middle. Should we pack it ourselves?

Hoops! Sorry. I should've read through the entire post. You've answered the snack Question!

We'll be taking that flight as well (hate midnight flights!!). But, the local time when it lands in JFK is around 5am - at least breakfast makes sense for that, after having tried to sleep for 7 or 8 hrs.

I assume you flew the midnight flight to TLV (or were you lucky enough to get the 7:40pm flight??) - if so, what meals did they serve?

BTW, you're lucky you missed the storm in NYC - today's flights were cancelled.

There are dozens of these threads on FT. Not so much about DL and this route. Bottom line is that there are a significant # of people who are not O&D JFK-TLV and are functioning on all manner of schedules in 24 time zones (perhaps not so many from the Aleutians or Siberia).

Thus, most carriers worldwide simply serve meals based on a local schedule in J. In F, which DL doesn't offer, there's no set service so one can choose the service order and often pre-order specific dishes. But, again, that's F and that's not DL.

Bert-

Actually, we flew here on Air France via Charles de Gaulle. When it became clear that on the return, we'd likely be stuck in Paris Delta switched us to the nonstop.

It still doesn't really justify things with this route... the vast majority of passengers on this route come from no further than Pacific time, so it's still very late at night for them - hardly a time when most people sit down for a full multi-course meal. The meal timings don't make sense relative to the flight origin, origin of most passengers, or even the flight's destination.

Another part of why I SO MISS the SQ partnership, where you could not only choose from a huge "book the cook" menu but pretty much have dinner served as Yu wanted when you wanted. Not to mention the lobster in the private dining room in the SIN FC lounge!