Anyway it was all over too soon and Tuesday evening it was time to come home :(, I personally have never been so overwhelmed by one place and it literally did take my breath away and I felt like I could live there after being there the first day, the whole atmosphere of the place, even small things like taking a walk around the block and reading the car numberplates to see what state they were from came from are enjoyable and individual things you miss about the place and Ben would be the first to agree as this wouldn’t be his first trip to NYC with the last being on the dreadful day that was September 11th 2001.

On the last day the checkout time was 11am but the hostel has this great facillity of lockers downstairs where you can leave your suitcases for $5 so you dont have to haul them around all day which we weren’t massively keen on. Anyway we spent the last day hauling ourselves round NYC again buying gifts for family etc but also ourselves…

ask Ben how much money he had left…:diablo:…

Later on in the day we made our way back to the hotel with another suitcase for all the stuff! in hand, we had to hang around for abit in the lobby before we could head off the airport so Ben ran up to Maccies to get us our final NYC milkshakes. Soon enough we had the hotel staff call us a cab company which only drives jetback Lincolns and costs about $10 extra but it was all worth it for the extra comfort, air-con and silent as hell car!

We eventually reached Terminal 9 again at JFK and entered and it was bloody big, big enought to hold 3 B747s actually 😉 (according to the sign on the wall :D), we were told to use the self-service check in machines which neither of us are all too familiar with but all we had to do was scan my passport and it asks you to find which flight your on and when you do it has all the booking info etc and an option to change your seat if you wish, you also have to say how many bags you are carrying each and that was that and out of it came the boarding cards and we left our cases with this women at the desk.

We went briskly through security and noticed that the first flight to LHR that evening had been cancelled, Ben eventually found out this was due to the aircraft having a birdstrike on landing. This flight was later reinstated so funnily enough you had two AA T7s right behind one another heading off to LHR, our flight wasnt untill 11:35pm. Terminal 9 really is massive but there isnt’t an amazing amount of shops etc located where all the gates are but we were really more preoccupied with the views out of the windows.

We killed time untill it was near enough departure time and we sat down by our gate just talking and whatever, we soon noticed a First Officer stroll by the gate on his mobile talking away as you do…”Oh yeh I’m at JFK now about to head to London” jealously was not the word :D. Eventually Ben decided to ask him about his pilot training and everything and Jon (surname I forget) told us how he’s been flying for AA for 20 years now starting his career on the B727 before heading onto the MD-80, the B767, the Fokker 100 and now the B777!

I also asked Ben to ask about the possibility of getting a flightdeck visit at the end of the flight and much to our surprise he said we could come in at the start of the flight! preety hyped up now we could see this flight would be near enough full and we started boarding and headed off down the walkway where First Officer Jon was waiting for us! and invited us into the flightdeck where we met Captain Don and the main man of the evening First Officer Tracy Miller. We spent a near half hour in the flightdeck of N791AN talking to Tracy while Jon and Don did various other things like the walk-around and Ben even got to turn on the ‘Seatbelt’ sign on the ceiling panel!

We had Tracy explaining literally everything to us, showing what screens do what, showing cabin temperature etc, how fully loaded we were, rotation speeds, how much engine power we’d be using etc. We were even allowed to take pictures a plenty and sit in the Captains seat each and apparently according to all 3 of them I look incredibly familiar to a character off ‘The Sopranos’ haha. This experiance has really put AA in our good books just because of how friendly they are and removing the sterotype that all America is totally high on security issues.

Eventually though we had to leave and take our seats in 39A/39B at the back and this flight really was full, the legroom seemed a tiny amount smaller than on the way but it was nothing too noticeable. We had a delay of roughly 35 minutes due to the wrong baggage being loaded onto our flight so we had to wait for that to be sorted but soon enough we pushed back and took off into the dark skies. We knew the flight was due to take longer at just over 7 hours and we had Tracy telling us earlier that we had some bad weather 4 hours of of Heathrow.

The ultimate good thing about flying out in May and back in June is you have the movie selection etc changing on the IFE and so after watching ‘Wild Hogs’ on the PTVs and having our evenin meal I think I eventually dropped off, me and Ben swapped seats at the cruise of FL370 just so we’d both have a window seat for abit. We both kept dropping off but for some reason it seemed alot harder than doing it on the inbound, maybe because we’d had a long day or what not but it was nothing too severe, as was the turbulance we encountered.

Soon enough we were desending into the UK where Captain Don told us we’d be in the hold at LHR for about 5 minutes but we eventually made our approach to 9L at Heathrow passing over the M25 where it was rather bumpy and the touchdown did have a bang but nothing worse than usual and we exited quickly to head over to Terminal 3.

After pulling up to the gate and what seemed an age to attach the airbridge we got off the aircraft and headed for immigration and funnily enough passed the awful flight connections queue which we were in 6 days earlier.

Immigration wasn’t too bad and we had to wait a while for our luggage before meeting Ben’s grandad reading his book 😀 and then his nan before heading back to the car and Guildford passing under the 9L approach path on the M25 on the way. Well that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this report and I didn’t get too carried away ;). If any of you ever get the chance to go to New York grab it with both hands!

We both want to say thanks again to the AA flightdeck crew of First Officers Jon & Tracy and Captain Don, hope you may end up reading this at some point! and I’ll certainly have no problems flying American again. Thanks again to ma mate Ben for an awesome holiday! here’s to another off somewhere else.

Tom