Flying to New York: not my day
I have posted on Twitter my account of the most memorable features of J’s and my flight from London to New York on Virgin Atlantic a couple of days ago. My Twitter posts (‘tweets’, in the jargon) are as follows:
# BrianLB Filled in exhaustive ESTA form for US Immigration online before US visit. Provided same info for US when booking flight online. Then same info inflight. Insane.
# Checked in for Virgin online, then queued at LHR for 50 mins for bagdrop behind man on same ticket as his namesake for same flight. 50 mins to sort out.
# Virgin flight LHR to JFK: baggage discrepancy delayed takeoff by 95 minutes. In premium economy seat for over 10 hours total. Purgatory.
# On Virgin Atlantic flight London-NYC woman across the aisle coughed non-stop for 10 hours. Assume viruses & bacteria recycled every 10 mins.
__________________
(Note: Some tiresome text-speak abbreviations, necessitated by Twitter’s 140-character per tweet limit, have been expanded in this version for the sake of clarity.)
In fairness to Virgin Atlantic, I should add that the food, once we got off the ground, was perfectly all right and the cabin staff friendly and helpful (not least when I spilled a full glass of Spanish white wine between my legs). Our landing at JFK was exemplary. Sir R. Branson might however care to look at the software which provides consistently inaccurate information on the television screen about 1 metre from your face about the aircraft’s position on the map, local time at the destination, and the number of hours of flying still to be endured before arrival. One just hopes that the information supplied by the aircraft’s computer system to the Navigation Officer is better related to reality. Presumably it is, since the plane seemed to find New York without much difficulty.
Originals of my Twitter posts, and my earlier tweets, are at http://twitter.com/brianlb. Join Twitter, open http://twitter.com/brianlb again, and click Follow to see my forthcoming Tweets — and that will allow me to ‘follow’ yours. It’s perfectly harmless, not particularly time-consuming, and quite enjoyable.
More on Twitter for beginners here.
Brian (in New York)
Why on earth would you want to place yourself within US jurisdiction? Unless you are some kind of masochist.
Brian writes: It’s difficult to avoid if you have a daughter and two granddaughters who are permanently resident in the US!