Tier Point Run to Las Vegas in Feb 2022: Day 3 – Los Angeles (LAX) to New York (JFK)

By Nige on Sun 20 Feb 2022 at 08:00
Type: Post
Story: Tier Point Run to Las Vegas in Feb 2022
Tags: American Airlines | JFK | LAX | Los Angeles | New York | Trips | USA

The last 24 hours have been a bit of a waste of time unfortunately.  Other than being asleep, I spent the majority of time during the day at LAX airport!  I love airports, but spending so much time at an airport and not actually go anywhere is slightly disappointing.

I managed another 3 hours of sleep overnight.  I was up and following a similar pattern as yesterday.  I was heading out of the hotel on the way to the airport at just after 4am.  On the way I came across a few individuals walking in the same direction as me.  Unfortunately, I was walking faster than them so I had to decide how I could pass them without making them (or me) feel uncomfortable.  It’s a really difficult thing to do nowadays.  Gone are the days that everyone assume others are innocent in nature.  Now it’s the other way around.

I arrived at T5 AA priority check in at around 4:30am – it’s about a 25 min walk from the hotel.  I made some good progress with a female check in agent, but when it came to needing to satisfy the requirements of entry into The Netherlands, I hadn’t printed out the Netherlands Health Declaration and the version that was accessible on my phone wasn’t filled in.  Later when I checked the version I had on my laptop, it was filled in!  The other problem the female agent threw at me was that I needed a covid test.  When I explained I couldn’t provide an antigen test outside of 24 hours before I depart for Amsterdam, she wasn’t happy.  Anyway, I went away to wait for a short while until I was within the 24 hours.  She wouldn’t short check me to London.

So, I walked to the front of the check in area, sat down, did my test and got my result back.  I filled in another version of the Health Questionnaire on my laptop.  I then went back over to the check in desk; I got a different agent and he was helpful.  I showed him the Health Questionnaire on my laptop, which wasn’t saved, nor was it signed, but the questions were all visibly filled in (what does that prove?) and I showed him my negative test result on my mobile.  All good and I was presented with boarding passes all the way through to Amsterdam.

I went through T4 TSA Pre-Check without any issues and I was soon back into the AA Flagship Lounge.  First thing I did was dump my stuff and head out to Starbucks in TBIT.

When my drink was served, I could see it wasn’t quite full.  I asked for a top up of hot milk and after a frosty exchange of words, he added some cold milk to my drink and I bit my lip.  I had wasted 30 mins of my life for a drink which I pay through the nose for and isn’t quite what I wanted.  Hey ho. Back in the lounge – had some toast and then headed down to Gate 41.  There had been two gate changes since I arrived at 5am!

Flight: BA4764 Equip: A321T
Sched Depart: 11:00 Actual: 11:13
Sched Arrival: 19:07 Actual: 19:21
Takeoff: 11:29 Landing: 19:12

As we got close to our scheduled departure time of 11:00, the captain announced that he had to review some maintenance logs to get them signed off.  That made me worry a tad since that’s exactly what the captain said yesterday on the aircraft that was delayed by 4 hours for the same reason!  Flight Aware was noting that the departure time had been put back by 15 mins – that was also the same event that happened yesterday.  I know I couldn’t cope with a significant delay since I would miss the last flight of the day back to London!

As it happens, everything was cleared up quickly and we pushed back a few mins before that revised departure time of 11:15. However, there was no pre-flight drink offered and no table cloths either.  Disappointing!

I had pre-ordered the beef rib which was overdone and not worth writing home about.  The side salad was really good, but the starter of burrata wasn’t my sort of thing at all.  I thought about the pasta that I chosen on the reverse flight the other day, when the beef rib was also an option, and the pasta was streets ahead of the beef.

I even stayed awake for the ice cream sundae.  Although I never quite get enough hot fudge sauce.  Whilst eating, I watched Spencer with Kristen Stewart.  A little bit OTT in my opinion, but who knows whether it was representative of real events.  I tried to watch the new version of Dune, but unfortunately there was descriptive audio built into the movie, which I couldn’t turn off for some reason.

I grabbed two hours of kip.  Not desperately comfortable but any kip is better than none, especially when I haven’t been able to enjoy that much sleep in the past two nights.

We arrived into T8, Gate 41.  It was good tracking the movement of the aircraft via the Inflight Entertainment System (IFE) within the confines of the airport.  It’s clearly a lot more accurate than the system that BA uses.

As with all AA flights, there was very little delay in offloading and I was smartly walking through T8 towards the Air Train.  As a test, I decided to follow the signs down to Baggage Reclaim, primarily to remind myself as to why it’s much better to follow the signs for Ticketing.  It was pretty obvious: the escalator took me down two storeys before I had to try and find a way back up to the middle level to which the Air Train connector is accessible.  I’ll remember for next time.

Follow the whole story here: Tier Point Run to Las Vegas in Feb 2022