Hello and welcome to this review of the flight from London-Heathrow Airport (LHR) to Ben Gurion Airport (TLV) , which I took on 22/23 April 2022 on my way back from family trip in London.
This flight is a significant personal milestone for me for four reasons: it was my first time flying as an adult, my first time flying after the COVID pandemic, my first time flying Business class on an airline other than El Al, and the only time I flew with COVID measures in effect.
Unfortunately, since this trip was with my family and took place several years before the initial writing of this report, I did not take many pictures of the flight: this report will be very image-poor, and I can only offer my apology for this.
The flight itinerary for the trip was:
Flight routing
- 1
- 2VS453 - Business - London → Tel Aviv - Airbus A330-300
LONDON-HEATHROW AIRPORT - TERMINAL 3
We left our hotel at 18, and arrived at Heathrow airport at around 19:30. Even though the Virgin Clubhouse lounge has its own private entrance and security channel, we did not make use of it as we weren't aware of its existence.
THE VIRGIN ATLANTIC CLUBHOUSE
The Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse, which is reached from a sideroom near Gates 13-22 by going up a staircase, is large and well-equipped, and offers a mix of public seating spaces and private alcoves, as well as excellent service - with Virgin Atlantic's usual cheeky touches, of course. However, unlike any other business-class lounge I used, there is no self-service buffet; all dining is strictly table service - however, the menu is extensive (the most extensive I ever had in a lounge), and even has the (highly valued) ability to customize meals to my perfection.
For my pre-departure dinner, I had a bao bun, a mac and cheese, and a fondant for dessert, all of which were excellent.
Compared to the four previous lounge experiences I had until then - in the TLV and JFK El Al King David lounges, both in 2012, which I was too young to remember properly, and in the CDG El Al King David lounge in 2018 and the TLV Dan lounge for the outbound flight just a few days prior, both of which were cramped, uncomfortable siderooms with only a small dairy-kosher buffet for food - this was a very extreme change for the better.
In fact, the LHR Virgin Clubhouse remains the very best lounge I ever stayed in - as my later lounge experiences (as of the initial writing of this report) would range from the decent lounges with disappointing dining options in Zürich, Frankfurt, and Prague; to the small sideroom that is the ATH Lufthansa lounge; all the way to the HKG Singapore Airlines SilverKris lounge, which was the worst of both worlds.
THE FLIGHT ITSELF
Aircraft information:
G-VWAG "Miss England"
Airbus A330-343 (construction number 1341)
Delivered new to Virgin Atlantic on 22 October 2012; 9 years and 7 months old at the time of the flight.
This was my first (and as of the initial writing of this report, the only) time flying on that plane.
On the Airbus A330ceo, Virgin Atlantic's Business Class, called Upper Class, utilizes Zodiac Aerospace UCS3 seats having 20-inch seat width, in a 1-1-1 herringbone configuration.
Each seat is equipped with an IFE screen, a USB-A plug, an AC plug, and a personal reading light. All of these are located on one of the seat's sidewalls (left on rows A and G, right on row K), which also hosts the tray table and fold-down cocktail table. In front of the seat, there is a footstool. The seat's other sidewall contains the seat controls, and not much else.
These seats have two unique features, which I have never seen in any other long-haul Business-class seat I flew on before or since - though my experience in that department is pretty limited*, even as of the initial writing of this report - the first of these is the car-style seatbelt buckle, located at the side of the seats where the controls are (though the seatbelt itself the complete opposite of a car one, thick and non-retracting, as it was airbag-equipped). The second one is the unusual method of converting the bed into a seat, as I noted on the outbound flight's report.
* - Apart from El Al's old product and Virgin Atlantic's UCS3s, the only other long-haul Business seats I flew on as of the initial writing of this report would be SWISS' modified Thompson Vantage on the 777 and Lufthansa's modified Collins Diamond on the A340, both of them in October 2024. In addition, I have a booked flight on El Al's 787 business class (which has stock Recaro CL6710 seats), which I will fly in February 2026.
We boarded at around 21:05; my seat for this flight was seat 7K, roughly in the middle of the cabin.
Virgin Atlantic was the first-ever airline to introduce a herringbone layout in business class, as early as 2003. The design was groundbreaking for the time, and it took other airliners 10 to 15 years to catch up.
Even though I took this flight in 2022, well after this sort of layout became standard and even a bit subpar, it was still a world away from the only other Business-class seat I flew on up until this trip (not just on a long-haul flight, but in general) — El Al's old business class product on the Boeing 777, which was a representative sample of the average business class seat in 2003, and notoriously behind-the-times in the 2020s.
At around that time, the safety video played - a gorgeously-animated piece that, in classic Virgin Atlantic fashion, alludes to the "i've-heard-this-briefing-a-thousand-times-already" nature of the safety video by parodying the various film genres you can find on an IFE system. Very gimmicky, but it fits with the Virgin Atlantic's general service philosophy.
Dinner was served around an hour after takeoff. However, I didn't take a picture of the menu and couldn't find it online.
The dinner consisted of a chicken schnitzel(?) in cream sauce, potato gratin, and a leafy green of some kind.
Soon after finishing dinner, I asked a flight attendant to make bed - a necessity due to the Zodiac UCS3 seat's unusual way of converting to bed mode, where a crew member would close your seat (like a laptop lid), as opposed to you pushing it to a flat recline by yourself.
I slept for around an hour or so before waking up in Turkish airspace, with the city lights of Antalya below me:
This gave me just enough time to finish watching James Gunn's Suicide Squad from the point I left off at the outbound flight.
The landing at Ben Gurion Airport was at 4:33, twelve minutes ahead of schedule, and the night was rather foggy:
