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Say goodbye to Virgin Atlantic’s 747s with dinner, champagne and aircraft tour for £50

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Virgin Atlantic is putting on an exclusive farewell retirement event for its Boeing 747 fleet at Heathrow next Saturday.

With 747s disappearing from the skies, this could be your last opportunity to explore the aircraft. It includes areas not normally open to the public, including crew rest areas and the cargo hold under the passenger deck.

Virgin Atlantic 747

The experience also includes a champagne reception in the upper deck ‘bubble’ of the 747 as well as a three course meal in the comfort of your own Upper Class seat.

(For clarity, the aircraft is not flying anywhere – this is a hangar event!)

Tickets are £50 which is, frankly, unbelievably cheap, given you would struggle to get a champagne three course dinner in a West London pub for that price!

The event will be held on Saturday 12th December with several different time slots available. There are 50 tickets available in total at £50 each.

Tickets will be on sale from 9am on Monday 7th December from this Eventbrite page.

Due to Covid restrictions and social distancing measures there are only 50 tickets available in total, for several different slots during the day.

All proceeds from the ticket sales will go to the Trussel Trust, which supports a network of food banks.

What’s included?

The experience is a three hour event at Heathrow and includes:

  • Champagne reception on the 747 upper deck
  • Three course a la carte meal in Upper Class
  • Full aircraft tour, including cockpit, crew rest areas, cargo hold etc
  • Opportunity to speak to Virgin Atlantic pilots, cabin crew and engineers including Yvonne Kershaw, the first female pilot to Captain the Boeing 747
  • Opportunity to get your photo taken sitting inside one of the jet engines!

For anyone who doesn’t get tickets, Rob and I will be attending a press event on Friday and are hoping to live-blog the event on our Instagram page. We will update you closer to the time when that will be happening!

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How to earn Virgin Points from UK credit cards (April 2024)

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(Want to earn more Virgin Points?  Click here to see our recent articles on Virgin Atlantic and Flying Club and click here for our home page with the latest news on earning and spending other airline and hotel points.)

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Virgin Atlantic and Flying Club

Comments (82)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Aston100 says:
    4 Dec4 December 12:08

    How many 747s do Virgin currently have in the fleet?

  • David Lawton says:
    4 Dec4 December 12:17

    I was excited until I saw the 50 tickets only. This is just going to leave me disappointed as I just know it will sell out before I can get 2. BA did nothing, and Virgin are doing it extremely limited. Anybody know of any airline that should post covid still be flying a 747 so I can go on one, at least one last time?

  • Andrew says:
    4 Dec4 December 13:12

    I seem to remember having a “debate” with you on the forum a few weeks ago Rhys when you were saying how ridiculous the SQ static aircraft restaurant was and why anyone would want to do it rather than go to an actual restaurant and yet enthusiasm for this?

    • Rob says:
      4 Dec4 December 13:13

      SQ was £500 wasn’t it? This is £50, for charity, and you get a full hangar and aircraft tour too. No-one is going for the meal which will be a very small part of it.

    • Rhys says:
      4 Dec4 December 13:15

      Difference is that this is the last opportunity to see the 747 in Virgin colours and includes a full aircraft tour which you can’t normally do. I’m actually most excited about being able to sit inside the engine 🙂 If it was just a three course meal I would be far less interested.

    • Andrew says:
      4 Dec4 December 13:36

      Fair enough. I still think BA would have been on to a good thing to do similar to SQ’s restaurant idea – as the crockery sale has shown, there’s great enthusiasm for this kind of thing. But we’ll agree to disagree 🙂

  • Nick_C says:
    4 Dec4 December 13:30

    Sounds amazing. I would love to be able to do this. I like seeing behind the scenes. Would particularly like to see the cargo deck and the crew rest areas. TBH I didn’t know the 747s had crew rest areas. When I flew on an SAA 747 in the 80s, the crew built a crew rest area from poles and canvass at the back of the economy cabin. (But I guess that would have been a 200 series, and things have moved on since then!) And the crew seats on AA777s 15 years ago were reclining seats curtained off in the economy cabin.

    The reason there are no central overhead bins at the front of the 787-9 is because that is a crew rest area.

    And although I never had any aspiration to fly with Thomas Cook, I was fascinated by the downstairs toilets on the A330.

    It always strikes me that there despite most passengers enduring cramped conditions, there is a lot of unused space on aircraft.

  • Simon says:
    4 Dec4 December 13:49

    Any indications in the material you’ve been given what the time slots might be?

    • Rob says:
      4 Dec4 December 14:32

      No. We don’t even know how many slots there are. There are 14 Upper Class seats on a 747. If all are filed it is three sessions.

  • Chris says:
    4 Dec4 December 18:43

    I’m not sure I would get away with flying from Austria to and back for this. I’m guessing that would be breaking the rules.

  • d4ve says:
    4 Dec4 December 20:51

    Do you get any Virgin Miles for booking?

  • Andrew says:
    4 Dec4 December 22:09

    Can my 7 year old come he would love this
    Someone else could have his drink and mine

    • Tariq says:
      5 Dec5 December 08:39

      Seems not unfortunately, Virgin posted 18+ only in the comments on their Instagram post in response to a similar question, due to H&S being in a live operational aircraft hanger.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

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