I have also done too many Transatlantics as a pax to remember all of them but one does stick in my mind. LHR to Bermuda on a 1011-500 which went up over Macrihanish. This to the astonshment of many pax when the captain pointed out the beautiful view of the western isles since the normal route was via Lands End . Trip took best part of ten hours routing over Iceland and Nova Scotia and south to BDA. Bermuda is both east and south of New York so thats an even more extreme favourable wind routing than LHR to JFK on the same sort of track. Again it was very very strong winds as the inbound flight from Bda to Lhr three days previously had done the trip in 4 hrs 58 and as an earlier poster wrote-very very very uncomfortable.
I was in Bermuda when the Lockerbie disaster occurred and a business colleagues son was booked on it but missed the flight -such is fate. It did occur to me at the time that the murderers who committed the crime actually had some knowledge about aviation and assumed the bomb going off say 45 mins to an hour after take off would cause the plane to crash pretty much without trace into the Irish sea or Atlantic. Because it came down on land it did mean the investigators were able to find the subtle clues that eventually lead to tracking down the killers-not sure they would have had much success with explosive residue traces and fragments of baggage had it crashed south of Cork for example
PB