American 115/116 & New York! (Long + Loads Pics)

Afternoon alll! firstly this is one long report with alot of pics so yanno, sorry to any dial-uppers out there, total lack of smilies and all to meet this annoying forum limit per post!

As you may or may not know, me and Ben (Airline owner) took a trip to one of the greatest cities in the world – New York, after Ben bringing the idea up back in December to general problems with passports and having to rearrange dates we finally booked it through Expedia!

The holiday being from 31st May – 5th June for an amazing £998 for the both of us, our hotel being located roughly 5 blocks from Central Park and great flight times! ie – an early morning departure from LHR and a late evening departure from JFK. Anyway on with the report….

We knew we had a long day ahead when the alarm went off at 3am, we were soon up and on our way to Heathrow’s Terminal 3 with me checking every 5 minutes if I had everything! like itenary, passport etc. We got to Terminal 3 which has a load of construction work in front of it going on, the screen showed our flight as not open yet but we could see a general area for all American flights which someone would told us would be open in about 30/60 mins so we became number 8 in the queue and started waiting.

Just talking about general random crap like we usually do passed the time quite well untill we were called to the desk where the women was quite friendly and started chatting to us about NYC, her job and not laughing at our passport photos. Anyway after a brisk and simple check we started to have a wonder round, had a can of Diet Coke each and decided to take the step that is through security at Heathrow!

All in all it wasn’t a bad experiance at all, maybe because we didn’t have to wait too long with how early it was and it seemed no different from any other UK airport I’ve flown from (yet…) we were surprised to see a guy remove a massive pair of scissors from his bag before he ran it through the metal detector, amazing how different the consequences may of been if he’d let his bag go through with it!

Anyway through security and into the departure lounge we still had time to kill so we had a general wonder looking at what a/c were parked up including two n/c UA 763s, had something to eat and watched BBC News 24. After some time we were getting quite bored and we could actually see what gates the AA flights would be boaring from so we headed up towards the gate area despite the flight not being called and sat around knewing it would be no more than 15 minutes before we were called.

Apparently BAA have a problem with that, and two people working for them told us we couldn’t so instead of making us walk back the way we came they advised us to head the way of arriving passengers and join flight connections to get back to the departure lounge and said it should only take around 15/20 minutes.

We joined this queue for flight connections which dissapeared round a corner and then another and by this time we had been waiting around 10/15 minutes and I was getting concerned because it was near 7:30am and our flight was due to be start boarding at 7:45am.

Then we had a saviour come along! a women working for BAA happened to walk past and took one look at us and said “Where are you two travelling too?” and we explained our situation and she asked us to go with her, so we went around the corner and saw the queue and were shocked at how long this could of took and we guessed at least one to two hours. She also said she’d been doing this job for way too long to notice people like us in a queue of predominantley Asian people on flights from the Middle-East connecting to US bound flights etc

Anyway finally back in the departure lounge we had to walk the way we had just came, it was annoying that all that could of been avoided if the original non-sensical duo who told us to move us in the first place sent us back the way we came. We happened to bump into them on the way back and explained the scenario to them rather briefly who just seemed to nodd it off, you wanted to express some-what more rage upon them but we decided that wasn’t exactly wise .

Anyway we finally reached gate 17, where we had some more security to contend with. Ben the sod was lucky enough to be let through after a boarding pass check but I was took aside along with other random people to have a thorough bag check etc. That was all over rather briefly and I got to sit down where we noticed all the flight crew walking through to board (inc. 3 pilots), after some man conducting a survey had delayed us getting up to start boarding we finally headed down the jetway to where N788AN was waiting.

We boarded rather quick and walked through the first class and buisness sections which always look more appealing 😉 and sat down in our seats at 35A/35B, American has a 2-5-2 seat layout on their B777s so this benifitted us rather well :D, the seats are very comfy and we were quite impressed with the legroom. We also noticed this flight was at best only going to be 50% full so me and Ben both got a window seat and people reserved the middle 5 seats for themselves to lye down on later in the flight!

Anyway we pushed back being surrounded by aircraft owned by rival UA in the form of an old colour B744 and B772 and headed off to RWY 27L where we got clearance ahead of a BA A319 for departure and what seemed like a low powered take off run we were off into the sky on our way to the USA!

Inflight we soon reached a cruising altitude of FL380 which towards the end of the flight reached FL400, we could hardly fault American on their inflight service which always seemed frequent and friendly when coming round with drinks, meals etc

The PTV’s had round about 12 channels of TV and the same for radio as well as an inflight map. All were controlled by touching the screen or with a remote from your seat which also doubled up as an inflight phone! all you had to do was scan your credit card, pay and ring. With the TV channels round about 3 were showing films and the rest showing a split of documentarys, comedy shows and what became mine and Ben’s favourite channel on the way out, Cartoon Network!

The radio had all sorts playing from country to just released stuff, the inflight map showed all the usual and we making very impressive time today due to reach NYC at 10:40am which was a good 40 mins ahead of the scheduled 11:25am

All in all it was quite surprising because on the internet we’d read very mixed reviews about AA ranging from very bad to very good so we were glad we had the latter, maybe it was a one off luck thing but we’d find that out on the way back. Anyway before long it seemed we had began our decent and were beginning our approach to JFK, being sat on the left we only had a great view of the water most of the time but we soon clocked onto the fact we’d be doing a visual onto 13L.

It was interesting because we seemed to sit idle at 3000ft eventually 2000ft for what seemed an age before making a turn toward the runway, he also didn’t extend the flaps at all untill we seemed to be on a not-longish final but hey he landed it and it was possibly one of the smoothest landings ever! also wierd to see an airport tug on fire as we went over the threshold!

After exiting rather quick we made our way to Terminal 9 passing by the area’s for UA, Jetblue and so on before taxiing to the gate at the start of cul-de-sac thing! finally we were here after all the planning that had gone into it, but after exiting our aircraft we made our way to immigration and this being the USA we weren’t expecting anything less than an strict and orderly experiance! JFK was amazingly quiet but this immigration area looked dedicated to AA so I guess it wouldn’t be massivly busy say like somewhere in Europe. We had our completed forms we’d done on the plane ready and handed them to the guy at the desk, we then had to have our fingerprints taken and a cam take a pic of our face before we were allowed through to get our bags which we hoped would be waiting for us.

We only waited round about 10/15 minutes for our bags to come down and we got them and headed out the Terminal where the NYC heat hit us right in the face, with all the massive vehicles and yellow cabs we had finally got here. We’d had an awesome experiance with AA and now we had to make our way to our home for the next 5 days. The cabs offer a flat rate of $49 for trips to/from Manhatten from JFK excluding any tolls etc you may go through which you have to pay, it seemed almost surreal to actually be here but after a journey of roughly 30/40 minutes we got to our place called ‘The Continental Hostel’ on 330 W95th Street + Riverside.

After paying off the cabbie and walking into the small lobby of our hostel where about 5 people were sitting on their laptops we checked in, this is where you have to love the simpleness of Expedia having every detail of your holiday on two peices of A4 paper, I quickly filled out a form for them, showed them my passport as ID and we were lucky enough to have a room 119 on the first floor. We headed up the stairs where the room numbers didnt quite match up and eventually realised when American’s say ‘first floor’ to any UK residents heading over there they actually mean ‘ground floor’ so that was even better having a room a literal two seconds walk from main lobby area/exit.

I’m not going to go into immense detail about everyday of our trip because I literally would be here forever but needless to say we visited all the usual sights and did ALOT!!! of walking, ie roughly 20+ miles on our fourth day walking down to the World Trade centre site. Anyway here’s a short selection of pictures which I hope you’ll enjoy, don’t laugh!