My First Opportunity to Travel First Class

     I had been working at Boeing for quite a few years when I had the opportunity to take a business trip to England to visit British Aerospace (BAe).  This would be my first unaccompanied international trip, which was a little bothersome to me so I was uncomfortable but also anxious.  It would also be my first time driving on the other side of the road and it was before GPS was available in cars.

     I was told by the specialist (Jack S) in my department that flying first class was permitted on an international flight.  Jack told me all I needed was to get the paperwork signed off by a particular person in our administration department, which I did and it was fairly easy. So now I'm even more excited because I had never flown first class before and thought this might be my only chance.  First class passengers had a lot of perks even better than business class, which was way better than coach.  

     I arrived at the early, which is just my personality; I don't like to be late.  Since I was flying First Class, I was on of the first to board the plane, which happened to be a Boeing 747.  You might be familiar with the plane there is a spiral staircase that goes to the First Class section on the top level in the nose of the aircraft.  I guess they felt the need to separate the elite first class passengers from the coach passengers.  It kinda felt like that Seinfeld episode when Jerry gets bumped to first class and Elaine is stuck in coach, but without the supermodel that appeared on that episode.

     The First Class section seated about 20 passengers but only about half full.  We had our own flight attendant to take care of our needs and with only 10 passengers we got great service.  The seats were spacious and the food was very good (when have you heard someone say that about airline food, no one ever!).  We even had dinner plates (you know the breakable kind) and silverware, not the plastic picnic ware plus real wine glasses. To say the least it was a very pleasant flight, not at all stressful like coach would have been.

     The flight back home was just as enjoyable but when I got back to the office my boss (Bill H) ask why I thought it was OK to fly first class to England.  I told him it was a company policy and I had no problem getting the paperwork signed off.  Bill told me it might be company policy but (Larry D) the department manager said it’s not department policy.  Hum, why would we need a department policy different from company policy.  I wonder if Larry flies coach class to England?

     Apparently the cost for the round trip flight was well over $4000, which was considered unreasonable by department standards.  So I apologized and went about my business.  As it turns out I had a few more trips to England that year but they were all booked as coach fare.  Now here’s the best part of the story, when I flew over the 1^st time the airline had a promotion going at the time which gave triple air miles to international travelers. Cool but what does that get you well it got me a white card, which bumped me to business class on my 2^nd flight, which also had the triple air miles promotion.  After that trip I received a gold card which bumped me up the First Class on my 3^rd trip, Woo Hoo!, take that Larry.