Review: British Airways World Traveler A380 Los Angeles to London Heathrow
Review: British Airways World Traveler 777-300ER London Heathrow to Mumbai
Review: British Airways World Traveler 777-200 Mumbai to London Heathrow
YOUTUBE: British Airways: Los Angeles to London Heathrow
YOUTUBE: British Airways: London Heathrow to Mumbai
YOUTUBE: British Airways: Mumbai to London Heathrow
Hello everyone, this second leg of my outbound journey from Los Angeles to Mumbai begins in London Heathrow’s Terminal 5 at one of my favorite airport restaurants, when not using a lounge: Huxley’s!
Yes even though fish and chips seems a little clique for UK food, this place has among my favorite versions of it. There’s just something that seems fresher about the food, even though 99% of it is deep fried. I’ve had a couple of the other dishes here, and they were fantastic. If you are ever in London Heathrow’s Terminal 5, please do be sure to go here!
Now onto the second leg, we will be in one of BA’s 777-300ERs with a 4 class configuration: World Traveler, World Traveler Plus, Club World, and First Class. I’ve noticed that many of BA’s flights to other cities in India lack First class. BA operates a 787-8 to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai which does not have First Class, and many other routes, although some of the higher demand routes like LHR-Delhi, and even LHR-Mumbai do have First Class.
Terminal 5 at London Heathrow, which houses British Airways, has 3 separate buildings. The main terminal which has all the A-gates mostly houses all the flights within Europe and basically all of British Airway’s narrow body aircraft. The other two buildings, the B-gates and C-gates, all house the heavy body planes and flights out of Europe. My flight was leaving from the C-gates, and so did many other flights around the same time, so the terminal was quite crowded. Here are some pictures I took after arriving at the C-gates via underground train:
Also in the above picture, if you look at the plane parked to the left (left from the photo’s perspective) of this 777, you will see the tail of another 777. That’s my ride to Mumbai! Below is another plane, a 747 this time with a beautiful sunset in progress behind.
Soon after, boarding began for our flight, and we made our way onto the aircraft, that’s it for LHR this time, onto the flight.
British Airways
LHR- BOM Boeing 777-300ER
We took our seats at seat 49K at the very very back of the bus. The seats on this aircraft were basically identical to the seats I had on my previous A380 flight so I won’t go into too much detail, though you can see the details if you click on the hyperlink right above. Highlighting the details, the seat width was ok, legroom was ok, but not if you are tall or sitting at a window seat because of the entertainment box, the seat is a little hard, but the headrest is fabulous.
We actually were ready to taxi out pretty soon and saw an on-time departure of 9:30 PM. After our taxi to runway 27R and steep departure, we got the usual BA pretzels:
The rest of the meal was served shortly after. The crew did not seem very nice on this sector. To be honest, as an Indian, that is partially our fault. Not me necessarily, but on flights to India I constantly see other passengers from “my part of the world” snapping their fingers at the crew, hollering after them, not obeying the overhead signs, etc. So while I don’t blame the flight attendants, I saw no effort on their part to smile a little or any such thing. Here’s the meal again, but sorry for not opening it this time, I do so in every other review, I promise:
So I’ll go clockwise starting at the top left. That was lemon cake, and that was good just like my last cake. I do not know what is with British Airways and lemon flavored desserts, but that’s two in a row now. Anyways to the right of that is a small container of Greek yogurt, or in India known as “dahi.” That is meant to be poured on the salad at the bottom right corner. To the right of the dahi are just bread, butter, and coke. Below the coke is the salad, which was alright, and actually tasted good without the dahi added. I’m not sure what was put in it, but it was decent. Left of the salad are water and the butter chicken. Like the last flight’s chicken, the degree to which it was cooked was wonderful and so was the temperature, but the taste was lacking. The curry surrounding the chicken was very watery. It did have some taste, but I cannot say that the altitude took away so much taste that the chicken lacked it. So, overall, it was an alright meal, the salad was ok, the lemon cake was great, and the chicken was cooked/heated well (if only the taste were as good).
Turns out we were passing over Frankfurt Main airport. I was looking out the window and saw city lights, but there was this patch of black that looked oddly like the shape of FRA. I took some pictures and turned on my IFE and checked the interactive map and sure enough, we were passing right over Frankfurt!
You can clearly see the outlines of the areas where runways 25R/7L, 25C/7C, 25L/7R, and 18 should be down there.
It was pretty fun to see that, but anyways with food in my stomach and work all caught up, for the time being, I slept nicely for about 4-5 hours :).
Here is a photo after waking up to see the dawn arising.
Morning rolled around and it was time for breakfast. I, once again for some reason, took a photo of the food box unopened:
I can tell you that it was the typical English breakfast with sausages, eggs, baked beans, and mushrooms. The eggs were lacking taste, but that’s how egg usually is unless you add salt or pepper, so that was fine and the egg was quite fluffy, so it was good. Mushrooms were ok, and the sausages tasted good, but it had too much salt. I had to drink water after every bite. They also gave orange juice and yogurt on the side as you can see above, those were pretty good for what they were. Although they gave us raisins, I did not eat them because I absolutely hate raisins.
After breakfast I got ready to enjoy the views because it was Monsoon season in India and as turbulent as they get, boy do I love a stormy landing. We eventually lined up and attempted landing on runway 27 but had to abort and go around” because, as stupid as it sounds, a helicopter was too slow in vacating the runway. 
As you can see, we had quite a journey on our approach to BOM. If you want to see the full landing on try 2, click here and skip to 8:22! Other than that our second touchdown was smooth and we arrived at our gate to a humid Mumbai. Now I’ve traveled out of Mumbai numerous times as well, and this was my first time arriving at the newly done international terminal and my god it was gorgeous. Check out my next report from BOM back to LHR for a detailed report on the new terminal, especially from departure side.
Otherwise here are some pictures to finish off this report:
Overall, the flight was alright. The seats, although hard, were pretty decent given the comfortable headrest they have in my opinion, but the food needs work in my opinion. I understand the the cooks who make these have to put that much effort into making a large volume of food, but it should still taste like something. With everything considered, I would not mind flying BA again, althought I am for the return journey. Stay tuned for the next report!