Japan Air Lines

The check-in procedure, at least in Bangkok, was pretty extraordinary. The First Class check-in desk was ultra high tech and cool - something one would normally expect to see on Star Trek, one of the good series, not Voyager or anything like that. After we were checked, tabulated, vetted, and searched we were escorted to Passport Control by one of the agents. Although there were fairly good sized lines at all of the desks there was none at the one labeled Diplomatic and VIP's. And that's just where we were escorted to. I guess it's official. Mary's a VIP and I'm honored to be her own personal flunky. Mom would be so proud. Needless to say, Mary was a little uncomfortable but I decided to do my best to give off VIP vibes.

After scooting through Passport Control the agent continued to escort us to the Sakura Lounge, JAL's lounge in the Bangkok airport. We were led to a private room, which turned out to be rather nice as the main lounge permits smoking everywhere. And since most of the clientele is Japanese, the lounge was a bit smoky, kind of like the Pacific Ocean is a bit wet. We relaxed there until our flight was called and then proceeded to the gate, going through security on our way.

Boarding was efficient and quick. Again, we weren't called till after the majority of the other passengers had boarded. JAL's First Class cabin is on the lower level and front of the 747. My only complaint with this location is that the nose gear is directly under the cabin and when it deploys and is stowed it's incredibly noisy. Scary sounding noisy. Fortunately, as a former aerospace engineer I was pretty confident that the screeching, scraping and thumping noises was not the result of some essential piece of aircraft structure breaking off and sending us all to our doom. But it sounds a lot like it.

The seats on JAL were not our favorite. First, they're obviously designed for their primary customer, small Japanese men. They're a little too narrow to be really comfortable for us. And unlike the first class seats on Cathay, Virgin, or British Airlines, there are no easy to reach pockets for storing essentials like magazines, water bottles and Dramamine. In fact, since the seats have so much leg room, in order to reach the pocket in the back of the seat in front of you, you have to unbuckle your seat belt and bend way forward, unless you have unusually long, apelike arms.

On the other hand, the seats do recline fully and they supply a nice blanket for long flights to sleep under. On the other, other hand (we're up to three - are you keeping count?), the controls for the seat back recline and foot rest are located on the inside of the arm rest. This positioning, coupled with our beefy thighs, produced two fun incidents. In the first, Mary needed to get up from her seat to visit the little girl's room. As she started scooting forward in the seat her thigh would hit the switch raising the footrest. At which point Mary was stuck and couldn't get out. So she held the switch down and retracted the footrest. She then started to inch forward at which point the switch was pressed down, footrest came up, and so on and so on. As Mary said it was quite a bit like an I Love Lucy episode.

In our second case of seat mayhem, I scooted forward to get something out of the pocket in the seat back ahead of me. While I was doing that I unknowingly hit the switch to drop the back down into the fully reclined position. When I sat back down I fell backwards and Mary's view of me consisted of a pair of legs pointing pretty much straight up. From this point onwards we considered our seats out to get us and acted accordingly.

Our first flight on JAL was just under 6 hours from Bangkok to Toyko-Narita Airport. Since the flight left at 11:00pm Bangkok time and we'd be going east through two time zones that meant that we'd arrive in Tokyo very early in the morning - around 5:00am. For some reason, neither of us could really get much sleep, I think because the seats, as previously mentioned, are a little narrow and the seat cushions a little too hard. And by this point we were scared that they'd try and fold us into a origami crane or something. So we arrived in Tokyo excited but kind of tired.

There was a snack served on board shortly after we took off but both of us decided to go with dozing rather than eating. However, since we weren't all that successful even at that, we both opted for a full Japanese breakfast before landing. It was....interesting. I liked it, Mary was a little less enthusiastic. The main entrée is a piece of broiled fish which I can see no problem with for a breakfast item. The egg omelet pieces (solid rectangles of cooked egg) were okay though they're frequently served cold, not exactly my cup of tea. The other items on the breakfast tray were pretty hit and miss. I always like a bowl of miso soup, but pickles, one of my favorite things in the world, just don't excite me first thing in the morning. Still and all, it was interesting and I'm glad to have tried it.

Service was pretty omnipresent. Cabin crew seemed to circulate through the first class cabin frequently, like every fifteen minutes or so, unlike domestic flight attendants who disappear after meal service until shortly before landing. If the JAL flight attendants catch you awake they immediately begin to ply you with snacks, drinks, shoulder rubs, that kind of thing. It's better to either feign sleep if you don't want to be bothered or to put on the headphones and watch a movie or something. By the way, I'm kidding about the shoulder rubs, I think. I didn't actually ask for one and wonder what would happen if I did?

Landing and disembarkation were relatively quick. Japan now is requiring all visitors to undergo fingerprinting and a photo on entry. But it's all electronic and totally non-invasive so no big deal. It helps that we were one of the first flights in that morning so the airport was very uncrowded.

Overall, we'd rate JAL below Cathay and Virgin and possibly roughly equivalent to British Air (though to be honest we've never sampled First Class on British Air and the Business Class we did use once was around five years ago). We'll have a better feel for that in a few weeks when we do take a BA First Class flight. The JAL service was on par or maybe even slightly better than Cathay's and a bit better than the British carriers. And as compared to domestic American carriers, well, it's not even in the same space-time continuum.

The main drawback with JAL is that their seats, while offering gobs of leg room, are not of a standard to compete with Cathay or Virgin (or as far as we can tell from others' opinions, Singapore Airline). If these were updated to a more modern configuration I think they'd be giving Cathay (our new Gold Standard) a run for their money.