British Airways BA2157 review - London Gatwick to Antigua

• Flight number: BA2157

• Origin: London Gatwick

• Destination: Antigua

• Distance: 6564 km / 4079 miles

• Duration: 8 hours 10 minutes

• Leaves on time:  83{bec4beb4183ddc16376e6eff89836f2abe3407e857522bf84005ba0ad48d654d}

• Average Delay: 37 minutes

Check in

Thanks to the British airways app on the iPhone our check in was quick and painless. You check on the app, select your seats and are given a virtual ticket with a bar code on your screen.

At Gatwick airport we walked up to an available check in machine where it scanned the bar code and printed both our boarding passes and labels for our bags.

A quick walk over to a bag drop and we were all done in record time with no queues.

Comfort

The seats are in British Airways trademark blue and with surprisingly more leg room than I expected for standard economy seating.

Being 6'4" tall and mostly legs I often find my knees jammed up against the seat in front but thankfully this wasn't such an issue for a change.

I did have to spend some of the flight with my knee jutting in to the isle which is usually fine except for getting bashed by food trollies or the occasional passenger not looking down.

The padding on the seats had seen better days while mine was not as cushioning as it once was, Deborah's back cushions had little to protect from the passenger behind putting objects in their seat pouch that jutted in to her back at times. An extra pillow soon sorted this out.

The head rests on either side are adjustable and really helped when trying to sleep for a while. We both managed I have a decent nap to offset the effects of jet lag.

One of the headrests was broken on my seat but thankfully this just meant it stayed down, closer to where id want it anyway.

In flight entertainment

This is a service that can really define a flight as good or bad. The range of movies was excellent with more big blockbusters than you usually see on long haul flights. While the size of the collection wasn't as big as other carriers we had no problem finding movies we'd wanted to see for ages.

With touch screen control its easy to navigate and pause the movies but with one drawback. The technology for touch control involved a clearly visible grid of lines on the screen that were often quite annoying during watching.

The screen quality wasn't great but after a while you get used to the reduced quality. I think this is an area that will come under increasing scrutiny in the future as we compare these screens to those of our tablet computers like the iPad and Android devices.

Other than movies, tv and audio there's little else on the in flight entertainment. Having experiences games on carriers back in 2008 some of which you can play against other passengers, I would have expected a little more from British airways on 2013 but I'm guessing this particular 777-200 is due overhaul.

Conclusion

An airlines ability to make a long haul flight seem like a simple journey is always something important to me and British Airways flight BA5156 did a good job of that. Suitably entertained and fed just about enough.

While there were a few extras I would have liked to see I was happy with what was on offer. The journey from Gatwick to Antigua was comfortable, smooth and above all easy.

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