Trip to New Mexico- part 1 (UA80 MAN-EWR)

I’m currently on my trip to New Mexico for field work in the Florida Mountains with Dr. Annique van der Boon!  We’ve finished up days 1 and 2 of field work now, and we’ve just put together our plan for day 3.  It’s going pretty well so far!

Here’s the first of our flights for field work!  Our flight left Manchester airport at 9 am, and since we’re going on field work, we had a lot of luggage to take between us.  Thanks to my United Premier Gold status, I could take 3 checked bags, which was great!  We therefore took a taxi to the airport.  We left at 5:30 am because there’s always something at Manchester… But that’s a story for Magnetictothecore to tell you.

At the beginning of 2020, United decided to stop giving partner lounge access to Star Alliance Gold members, which led to Star Alliance rewriting its rules… That being said, I’ve previously visited the Escape Lounge at Manchester Terminal 2, and it was pretty bad.  United members were relegated to one half of the club and it was extremely busy, and everything was lackluster.  So there’s no real loss in this case, but its more the principle of it.  Instead, Annique and I just sat around in the terminal.

Manchester has been rebuilding terminal 2 for at least as long as I’ve been living in the UK. On the plus side, the terminal now has these really nice glass jet bridges! Everywhere should have them. 

Normally, I don’t like to get on the plane too early, but since we had exit row seats, I boarded with group 1 so we could get our bags in the bin above us.  We found our seats immediately- 22A and 22B.  The 767, with a 2 – 3 – 2 configuration and 18” seats, is such a comfortable design.  It’s probably my favorite aircraft I’ve been on in economy.  These are probably the best economy plus seats on the plane (free for us with the Premier Gold status!), as we had lots of legroom.  The TV screens were pretty large for economy and had a USB charger.  We also had 1 universal power port between us

Boarding was complete in under a half hour, which is pretty quick, I think.  It makes sense though because it’s only 3.5 seats/aisle.  About a half hour after take-off, they came through with drinks and then breakfast.  I got a beer because it was 9 am in Manchester, so it seemed reasonable. They started with the special meals, which I assume included anyone who’s a vegetarian because everyone else got served the same chicken and waffles.

The food was pretty good overall, but the amount of chicken with the waffles was pretty small.  I liked it though.  The flight was overall relatively uneventful, which isn’t a bad thing.  I got to watch a couple movies and TV shows while working on my laptop.  The downside was that there were two ads before each new episode/movie, which is typical for United, but got very repetitive very quickly, especially after the TV epsiodes.

                Annique and I tried to get some good pictures out the window, but it was cloudy the entire way across the Atlantic, and since we were on the left side of the plane, the only thing we could have ever seen after Ireland was water.  But since we were on the left side of the plane, we had a good view of New York City on approach to EWR, but the picture doesn’t really do it justice.

For this 7-hour flight across the Atlantic, I no longer got lounge access (0/5), got a decent breakfast and end-of-flight sandwich (3/5).  The service was decent and efficient for a US carrier (3/5), and the seat was arguably the best economy plus on the plane (5/5), and had a great selection for in-flight entertainment, but the repeated ads were obnoxious (3/5).  Overall, I give it a 14/25.