Personal favourites from a pax perspective
Historical favourites:
Concorde which I flew a number of times in 1982 and 1983 between London and New York - it felt like a Fokker Friendship in terms of body and window size but I enjoyed the 'second take-off' acceleration thrust during transition from subsonic to supersonic, the Mach speedo (which was the main IFE), seeing the curvature of the Earth from the 45,000 feet plus cruising altitude, and even the very bumpy approaches caused by its poor aerodynamics at low speeds. But apart from that I always thought of a Concorde flight as a long lunch in a grey leather seat preceded by what seemed back then like obsessive security screening including luggage strapping by BA at Heathrow!
DC-10 - a disaster of a design (poorly concealed by the MD-11 'renaming') but certainly in business and first class extremely comfortable and quiet compared to their contemporaries in the late 1980s.
Fokker Friendship which I first flew in 1961 between Sydney and Wagga Wagga - loved the great view from the windows unobstructed by wings.
Sunderland Flying Boats - only flew in one in Fiji but they were ponderous and noisy things that you thought would never take off. They had a charm that was captured by the Film Australia documentary 'The Last of the Sunderlands' when the Rose Bay service ceased in the late 1960s. Co-incidentally the Museum of Sydney has a current exhibition of Sunderlands memorabilia.
Current day favourites:
B747-400s - love the upper deck as it still has the feel of a small aircraft and a window seat with capacious storage lockers.
A380 - yet to try it but if I could win Lotto the SQ flying bedroom would be the only way to go to London!
Least favourite:
Any a/c but especially the B767s without individual air control nozzles and which blast cold air down the wall and window without regard to the window seat passenger's comfort.
Any a/c where you can't read a laptop screen if the pax in front has the seat reclined.
And the Dash 8 for its inadequate storage space and misnamed 'Premium Hand Luggage' which goes in the hold. And seat 1A only has about 2 inches of legroom with certain entry-partition configurations. It should not even be in the seat allocation system!
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Philip
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