Tier Point Run to Hawaii in Jan 2023: Day 2 – London (LHR) to New York (JFK)

It was pretty quiet in the CCR. Although I had debated about having breakfast in the CCR, my initial focus was on caffeine, so I hot-footed it down to Starbucks and joined a very long queue. For whatever reason, Starbucks only had one counter open.

Slight Digression: it is funny how on every trip when I need to visit the facilities in the CCR, it’s always the same cubicle that is available. Which cubicle is always available to me changes between trips, but it appears to be a trend! Weird!

On my terminal walk, I saw a celeb waiting to board a flight to Paris at Gate A20. She had a big fancy fur coat on, but I couldn’t put a name to her face. Of course doing a search on Google didn’t help. That’s one thing Google isn’t good for. If you don’t give any specific terms, google just can’t help. Later on I reviewed the list of actors that have appeared on SVU – there are thousands of them. My thinking was that if she was an American actress (I was convinced for some reason she was), just about all actors appear on SVU at least once. It’s a bit like the Holby City series here in the UK. Anyway, after about 20 mins of searching, I stumbled across the actress I was thinking of: Robin Weigert. We would have seen her in a number of series, but specifically Big Little Lies.

Flight: BA0115 Equip: 777-200
Sched Depart: 14:00 Actual: 14:20
Sched Arrival: 17:10 Actual: 17:23
Takeoff: 14:41 Landing: 17:08

I walked down to Gate B45 via The Transit Walkway about an hour before scheduled departure time. I can normally take a leisurely stroll along this very quiet corridor and easily get to the gate with time to spare.

Gate B45 wasn’t too stressful when I got there. There were a lot of passengers milling around but they left lots of gaps in between them, so it was easy to get to the front of the priority boarding queue. When boarding started about 40 mins departure time, I was third on.

In to seat 02A and I was quickly offered a glass of LPGS, a menu and a hot towel. I joked with the cabin crew about it actually being hot, whereas most of the time they are cold. The cabin crew member joked it was down to his 20 years of experience.

This aircraft had the old First Class suite with the new Club World (CW) suite just behind – not sure who got the better deal: old First Class or new CW? I guess there’s still a big difference in the service offered between First and Business, so even if it was the old First Class suite, I concluded it was still better to be in the old First Class suite than being in new CW.

I managed to get a second glass of LPGS (pre-flight) helping out the cabin crew by finishing off a bottle. In fact I got a third glass due to a delay in pushing back. Lucky me!

I couldn’t find any movies I had any interest in, so I looked up the TV offerings. I found on Paramount+ a series called Aerial America which is a documentary about various states. So, I started with the episode about Hawaii! It was nice to see lots of the places that Vick and I have been to over the past 10 years and some new places that we may travel to at some point.

The suggestion by the captain was that we were expecting to push back on time, but the pressure cooker of Heathrow put paid to that idea – we were asked to delay by 20 mins due to Heathrow trying to process a backlog of aircraft. Why the captain didn’t know that before he suggested we might be pushing back on time, I’m not sure.

The LPGS continued to flow as we finally took off about 40 mins after departure time. I put in my order for food and looked forward to tucking in. The amuse bouche was up first.

I went for the cold beef wellington starter which was excellent.

For main course I went for another beef cheek. The beef was so tender! In fact the sides were great as well.

Pudding was bread and butter with ginger custard. Very nice but a bit on the small side.

As a result of nothing being of particular interesting in movies, I went for an old favourite: Sideways. It’s an annoying movie, but there’s something about it… I got half way through the movie and I decided it was time to have a nap. I need to take every opportunity to sleep on a trip like this!

Once I was awake, I finished off Sideways and it was magically time to eat again! With about 90 mins to go, the cabin crew invited me to have the light meal. I ordered the Caesar salad as a starter and the katsu burger. I had these on a previous trip and they were very good.

The Caesar salad was very cold and in fact the slice of egg was still frozen. I quietly fed that back to the crew. That really isn’t what you expect from an airline’s First Class service.

The katsu burger was very tasty. The bread was slightly toasted at the edges, but the burger was warm throughout.

Final approach provided the opportunity of watching a stunning sunset – it wasn’t a great view out of the small aircraft windows, but after a bit of cropping the photo I took, this is what I ended up with:

After watching that amazing sunset, I was looking forward to arriving into New York JFK. It reminded me about how late it was (in the day) and how much further I still needed to go on this tank of fuel! We arrived into Gate 18 on the end of the pier at Terminal 8.

By the time we had reached the gate, we were about 15 mins late. Overall, slightly disappointed that we ended up late, which was all down to pushing back late at Heathrow. Seems to be the norm nowadays with Heathrow and BA.

We deplaned from door 2L and I managed to skip through to the front and was first in to the Global Entry kiosks. No issues encountered and I was soon heading through baggage reclaim and back up to the new combined BA/AA check-in. I was looking forward to getting into the new lounges again. Seeing whether anything has changed.

Follow the whole story here: Tier Point Run to Hawaii in Jan 2023