Over the last few weeks I have been able to compare the economy class seating on some big long-haul aircraft - and it was fascinating.

Cathay Pacific's A340 has 2-4-2 seating. It's comfortable with good leg-room. There was no intrusive in-flight entertainment box under the seat in front of me - some aircraft have this, and it's a nuisance because it means you can only comfortably stretch out one leg! However, because the seat pillars were offset, I couldn't totally stretch out my legs.

The in-flight entertainment was less comprehensive than on Emirates' A380 - less music, extracts only from classical symphonies and concertos, and no cameras.

The plane was very quiet with comfortable seats. They recline by moving the seat squab forward, rather than by moving the seat back backward. This is better for the person behind, but reduces the legroom for the person reclining!

The left hand seatbelt is thicker than normal, and padded. I didn't find this particularly comfortable.

Emirates B-777
Seating is in 3-4-3 configuration. The seat pitch was poor when the seat in front was tilted back. Footroom was restricted in some window seats.

The seat-back pockets were really too small: I had A4 sized papers to look through and there wasn't enough room for them.

The in-flight entertainment was reasonable, although control using the mouse was difficult, with unintuitive movements and unpredictable results.

I really only used the map and the cameras. On the map, there were too many distracting advertisements and irrelevant bits of Emirates news. The forward and downward camera options were good.

Emirates' A380
My flight was at 7:45 and the first metro arrives at the airport at 6:47, so I needed the service to be quick and efficient - and it was. I had checked in my bag the previous day (and, well done Emirates, checked it through to Barcelona on BA from Heathrow, on a completely separate booking - and Emirates gave me air miles on the BA flight!).

The security queue was quick and efficient: there was slight ambiguity in the signage to the gates, possibly because you could go one way for a lift and a different way for escalators.

There was no gate information until the upper level, the duty free area, which was quite crowded. However the gate processing was efficient. There was a 2-level gate lounge - First and Business, and Economy below. The economy lounge was big, with toilets and free newspapers (including the Financial Times).
Television screens had messages calling passengers by zone - families, then from the back of the plane: I saw no evidence that this was policed so if you just turned up, you could probably just walk through.

There were three jetways in use - one for the upper deck, and two for the lower deck (Zone C, and Zones D, E, F and G at the rear).

The lower deck started with row 44. This is behind, and a few steps down from, the flight deck.

Seating was in 3-4-3 layout. The seat support was just slightly in the way if you wanted to stretch your legs out, but there was no in-flight entertainment box there.

The seatback pockets were big, unlike those on the 777.

Spotlights were well positioned and the airflow was good although difficult to reach when strapped in.

The airshow (moving map) was good, with the map over most of the screen and flight information on the right hand side: stationary, in the airport, ground speed was 0 and true air speed 70 miles/hour!

The television screen included the seat number - nice.

Forward, downward and tail cameras (the latter high on the tail, looking forward) were accessible on the airshow: there was useful streaming information below the map but too many advertisements. Changing between screens or between cameras was sometimes slow and unresponsive. Coming in to land at Heathrow, you got full benefit of London rain on the camera lens! The ability to switch off the Arabic text - displayed for half of the time - would have been appreciated.

There was a USB port and a power socket between each economy class seat (and at each first/business class seat).

The cabin was quiet.

One downside is the limited headroom when the overhead bins are open. They are also quite heavy when full, so people who were not particularly tall had trouble shutting them.

My notes record the push-back as being "imperceptible" - which is impressive, on an aircraft that size.

There were plenty of toilets - at the front, one each side and two up the staircase towards the flight deck (and, possibly, more for the flight deck crew).

Windows look big but in fact are not - they are less than A4 size. They look big because the window orifice on the internal skin of the aircraft is much larger than the window proper on the outside.

When the seatbelt sign pinged for turbulence, there was no check by the cabin crew that people obeyed. There was also the usual reluctance to turn the sign off again afterwards so as usual some people ignored it.

There was a lot of crew communication - the "ping ping" sign - which was a nuisance if you wanted to sleep!

I was very close to the front of the aircraft and, probably because there was a separate jetway for first and business class passengers, was able to disembark quite quickly.

I was told by someone who had tried it that the business class seats on the Singapore Airlines A380 were actually not very comfortable. Because they convert to a bed, they are very wide - too wide to sit in comfortably!