Home > Virgin Atlantic > 2003 > Review

Taken January 2003 from London, England (Heathrow Airport) - LHR to Johannesburg (Jan Smuts Airport) - JNB

Virgin appear to apply the same interior treatment to their aeroplanes as they do to their train fleet. All red and purple seats, with jolly cartoony diagrams of what to do if the plane crashes into a lake. Very sugary, but if anything I'm more of a fan of conventional airline design schemes.

The 747 was equipped with a superb entertainment system. You could call up movies on demand and pause them for meal breaks etc. Shame that there was no 'hold' button, so if you leaned against the controller you'd end up turning the screen off.

My main gripe about this flight was that somebody managed to crash a luggage truck into the fuselage just before takeoff. Consequentially, the luggage around the dent had to be removed so that the offending panel could be replaced. This took about 4 hours, during which we were confined to the cabin and given glasses of juice and the occasional small pack of pretzels.

Given the fact that this was an evening flight (i.e. highly unlikely that anyone else would be using that particular gate), you'd think it would have been possible for the passengers to disembark and engage in a bit of leg-stretching before the tantalising prospect of a ~10 hour flight.

The actual flight was fine, the movies were good and to my recollection the meal was delicious. I was just thankful that I had been able to get in contact with my relatives who were due to meet me in SA and warn them of the delay. Goodness knows what it would have been like if I had had to make a connection to Durban.

Virgin's response to my e-mail of complaint didn't exactly show much concern for me as a customer. Given that I was due to take another flight with them in 10 weeks time they could have offered me a free upgrade or something nice like that! Tying in with this, the seats were rather tight.

The flight was part of a Star Alliance Round-the-World ticket which cost ~£1,200 for 7 flights and as such represented extremely good value!

I would fly Virgin again, but their current fares to SA are really rather high. KLM is cheaper.