Flight: British Airways BA 626 from London Heathrow to Athens
Duration: 3 hours 50 minutes
Equipment: B788 (Boeing 787-800)
Class: Business
Seat: 1 D & 1E (1D is forward facing & 1E is rear facing both with direct aisle access)
Seat Specification: True Flat Bed, Seat pitch: 75 “. Seat width: 20”
Normally British Airways Boeing 787-800 aircrafts service long haul destinations. But due to Covid and full reopening not happening at the time, we lucked out and got it on our short flight from London to Athens.
British Airways Boeing 787 has 2 business class cabins, with 3 and 2 rows of 2 x 3 x 2 configuration in forward and rear cabins respectively. Each row has 3 rear facing and 4 forward facing seats and all seats have unrestricted aisle access (which is different than direct aisle access as the rear seats have to go around the other seats to access aisle).
The seats have a privacy divider between them. If traveling alone, this can come to great use as it would be weird to sit and stare at the person right opposite each other.
Flight crew started breakfast service just after takeoff. There was no menu provided. I chose hot english breakfast with scrambled eggs, sausage and mushrooms. I do not care for scrambled eggs much and the mushrooms were very salty but the sausage was ok.
The flight time was only 4 hours but I still wanted to try out the flat bed so went ahead and laid out the seat in bed mode and took a short nap for an hour. The seat padding is comfortable.
Bottomline:
Seat: ****1/2
Service: ***
Food: **
The seat was quite comfortable both in upright as well as in flat bed position. However, the one thing I did not like was that all of the aisle seats felt very open and lacking privacy. The only seats that felt private were the window seats, and the rear-facing middle seats. However, it would be weird facing a seat mate when traveling alone and if the privacy divider was kept down.
The breakfast left much to be desired. The scrambled egg was bland and mushrooms way too salty.