Originally Posted by Snave

Mrs Snave and I flew back to the UK a couple of weeks ago. I hate overnight flights, and found that you can fly YOW->YYZ->LHR and back LHR->YOW direct for the same price as Ottawa-london direct. The point being is the Toronto to London leg is a daylight flight arriving into London about 8:30pm UK time. In the end they cancelled the return direct flight and we had to return via Toronto again, but this way we got four flight's worth of Aeroplan points instead of two.
Food on both long haul flights were OK, cabin staff were Mumsy, IFE system quite good and recent films were being shown. It even had 2.5 Men on.
If I were to grouse about anything - it would be this: On arrival at LHR we were in the stack for about 45 minutes, and when we landed we taxied off the runway to a parking spot for another 45 minutes. During this time no announcments ("sorry about the delay" etc) were made. So we got to the gate around 90 minutes late. On the way back the aircraft was landed so hard, with a bang, that many of the overhead bins opened, throwing bags and coats out. Then when we got to teh gate the jetway wouldn't work so we were sat for 45 minutes while they fixed that. This time there were plenty of apologetic announcments.

Originally Posted by Souvenir

Not sure I'd relish arriving at LHR at 8.30 after a transatlantic flight, with another 2-3 hours of travelling still to do.

AC can't make up its mind when the Ottawa-London flight should leave. Sometimes it goes at 10.30pm, which is OK because it's bedtime by then and the plane arrives at a reasonable time (mid-morning). Sometimes it leaves at 6.30pm, which is horrid. I have on several occasions routed myself through Toronto, just to be on a "proper" overnight flight.