Off to Manchester! Well, that was a few weeks ago.
A fascinating trip to the UK started, more or less, with a flight from PHL to MAN (that’s Philadelphia to Manchester in airline lingo) on an A330-200. Generally, the A330 is a nice airplane. It is laid out in the 2-4-2 setup back in the economy department. We had a “2” on the left side of the airplane.
The seats are nothing to write home about, but we had the Main Cabin Extra which gave us a tiny bit of extra room. That is a nice feature, but it is about 30″ less than what you got on a Pan Am flight across the Pacific in a Boeing 314 back in 1939. Go figure, eh?
Anyway, I had been advised by online reports that the seat-back entertainment systems were nearly unusable because the touch sensitive screens weren’t touch sensitive. That was, in fact, about right.
The cabin crew was fabulous. They were among the best ever. Without these fine folks the flight would have unpleasant.
Flight time was around 6 1/2 hours, and although we were tired when we arrived (it is nearly impossible to get a nap in economy these days) we were in sound mind and ready to tackle the first big chore, getting our rental car.