stupid lights
 

Once on a DL transcont in First the overhead light, controlled by the computer system, kept blinking on and off all night as the system (linux!) would reboot, crash, memory dump, reboot. rinse repeat for the whole flight. i wanted to stab someone in the eye @#$@##@

That's why duct tape and blankets come in handy ;)

well now
 

i actually tried to tape a napkin over the light but those things get super hot. in the end delta ended up giving me a voucher and some skymiles i believe. it was one of my first and only whiny posts on FT....

VIASA, bankrupt nationalized airlines of Venezuela, CCS-BOG. There were two rows of seats in first class. Row 1 was non smoking; row 2 was smoking.

While technically it was a J seat, the old UA 762s had some pretty bad seats. While they did have two seats (10 and 11F I believe) that were single seats with a table next to them, the rest were nothing special. Pitch and legroom were pretty much nonexistent and the footrest was essentially worthless. Controls were manual and they felt old and tired as did the rest of the plane.

Though as it was the only UA aircraft without E+, it was at least better than Y.

Any EU airline with pseudo F - 2 seats Y separated by a table - LH, BD, BA, AF
All the seats are much worse than any US carrier domestic F.
The difference is the food is often more and better.

KLM within Europe is worse. They sometimes fill every seat in front of the curtain, so that it's either 2-3 or 3-3 across.

I had a flight where I had reserved an aisle seat in the second row pretty far in advance but when (they said) an earlier flight had cancelled, they cancelled all seat assignments and I ended up at check-in with the middle just in front of coach (moveable curtain) with a toddler screaming and kicking my seat and two crying lap babies in the row behind me. To add insult to injury, KLM ran out of meals on the flight and FAs encouraged coach passengers, especially children, to line up to use the forward lavatory. I almost came to blows with a passenger in a "good" seat with a meal who objected to my complaints about the flight.

UA's first class seats on its 763s that fly to Hawaii are awful. The pitch is lousy, the recline is poor, and legroom on many of the seats is further reduced by boxes under the seat, which you might expect would be entertainment boxes, but for the fact that there is no seat-back video.

lol Haven't heard that one before.

Re the person who said the Asian carriers are doing first class best these days, true but I'd put some of the same carriers up for worst economy. Air China had fine first class DXB-PEK but the economy PEK-YVR was the worst economy I've experienced anywhere; crummy seats even for economy, broken entertainment systems, food so bad it was a joke, robotic useless FA's.

Domestic I find few first/business/whatever are much better than Virgin America's main cabin.

PE
 

The worst first class seat is the one I wasn't sitting in! Meaning I was in coach.

That said, flew Air Namibia business class Frankfurt to Windhoek, which was actually quite passable. On the return, the Air Namibia aircraft supposedly went mechanical or some other nonsense, with an outfit called Euro Atlantic turning up to operate the flight with an ancient L-1011... this was 2007, folks.

Let's just say that Euro Atlantic was helter-skelter at best, with the business class IFE consisting of a piece of duct tape flapping above my head for what seemed like an eternity.

The food: Air Namibia catered, Euro Atlantic crew served. Enough said.

But this is not Pseudo F. It is marketed as business class (or Club Europe in the case of BA) or Premium Economy. In Europe, as in Asia, F means F.

Ah, yes, but it was great having the single seat to one's self! There was even extra storage under the little tables.....

p

This was actually a legacy from when domestic airlines in Australia moved from two classes (F and Y) to three classes (F, C and Y) and then back to two classes (J and Y).

Originally our F was the same as domestic F in the States - 2+2 dedicated seating on narrow body 727s and 737s. We then introduced 'business class' which was just 3+3 seating immediately behind first class (but in the same cabin as F, the curtain was behind the last row of business class.

When F was no longer offered, the seats stayed there... so some business class passengers were seating in the dedicated 2+2 seats, and the rest sat in the normal 3+3 seats (which then became 'convertible' to remove the middle seat and provide a psuedo 2+2 configuration).

So distinctly 2 types of J seating in a narrow body aricraft.

I wasn't comparing to other RJs. And I thought Delta finally retired the DC-9s? Who is still flying them with F?

While not in First, but Econ on a US Air 757 from FRA to PHL this summer, the seat control kept malfunctioning and setting off the Attendant Call. It did this over and over for at least 20 minutes on the ground while at the gate and during taxi, which earned me the venomous ire of the entire flight crew. (They initially thought I was being an .......). They reset the system twice on the ground and twice after takeoff and it still kept setting off the Call bell.

Finally, they had to shut it off completely, so I had no in-flight entertainment at all. Thankfully I had some Ambien, so I just slept most of the way.

Pro-Tip: At least on the US Air planes, when you hit the attendant call bell more than 5 times in a row, an alarm goes off in the cockpit telling the captain that there is possibly an emergency back in the cabin. Having that cockpit alarm go off several times also made the Captain and First Officer rather unhappy with me as well. BUT, when you want attention, hit that button over and over ;-)

As for the worst First Class seat I had...

First, I saw the discussion about E190s... the US Air E175/170s don't have F at all. The 190s do in the 1-2 configuration. The BEST First Class seat I've had was on that single seat row on the port side of the cabin... I've never had a better seat, and I think it was because it was a single seat.

The worst on any flight has to be Row 1. I don't like the first row (or any bulkhead row, really) because there's no underseat storage, usually not much in the way of pocket storage, and in some planes, the bulkhead is so close you can't really stretch out your legs like you could if there were a seat ahead of you...

My list mileage run for 2010 put me in 1D and 1C on a couple of US flights, and I didn't like the feeling of being squished (that and staring at a blank wall for the duration of the flight.)