After an early arrival from Timisoara with Lufthansa City Airlines, I had about two hours to kill before my next flight to Amsterdam would depart. Craving a bit of a proper breakfast, I was quite surprised with the very limited choices one had around this time as the majority of restaurants were not open as of yet and those that were, were completely full to the brim where one had to wait 30 to 60 minutes to even be able to have somewhat of a bite. Given that I already did have a minor breakfast on the previous flight, I changed my mind and decided to head over to the gate of my flight.
Knowing that my flight would be operated by a CRJ-900, I was already fully aware that I had to go down a level in order to get to one of the gates where one either had to get to their aircraft by foot or by bus.
Gate G63 would be the gate that would be serving our flight to Amsterdam and this would also mean that we will be shipped to our aircraft by bus. At the moment they were still boarding a flight to Toulouse which saw a significant number of passengers rushing to the gate as they arrived quite late on a previous flight. The ground attendant made it clear with some snarky tone that next time they'll have to be here earlier in order to depart on time.
The section where my gate is located however does not see a lot of activity today and the sole restaurant/bar that is available here was closed the entire time I was present.
Once the Toulouse flight departed, our flight appeared on screens and about 20 minutes prior to our scheduled departure time, boarding was called. The boarding process wasn't particularly fast as the ground attendant was dealing with 80 passengers all by herself and to verify whether passengers had trolleys with them or not as one can not take trolleys on board their flight with CRJ's and should be dropped off in front of the plane itself.
It took about twenty minutes to fill all passengers into a single bus that became some sort of tetris game as passengers failed to optimize space by getting more into the aisle of the bus. Never understood why people refuse to give space or are one of the first to board the aircraft knowing that your luggage will fit anyway.
Don't understand why Lufthansa is trying to fit all passengers into one single bus for this flight (as I know KLM is using two buses for their E175 fleet, which is similar in amount of passengers) as the experience becomes very unpleasant and the ride itself could take sometimes quite a while. It's usually these small details that make me try to avoid flying LH on longhaul destinations, while OS and LX are doing much better on these fronts.
After a 10 minute ride or so, we have finally arrived to our aircraft where people are trying to force themselves into being the first on board.
D-ACNL, this 15.5 year old (at time of flying) Mitsubishi Canadair CRJ-900 (or Bombardier as most would probably brand it as) has been newly delivered to Eurowings in March 2010 before it being transfered to Lufthansa CityLine in June 2016 where is has been flying since. It is named after the city of Landsberg am Lech, which is about 50 minutes west of Munich.
While some may not agree with me, but I think the CRJ is probably one of the worst regional aircraft ever build as it lacks on all fronts. Legroom is often way too limited, the width of the cabin with a 2-2 configuration is unpleasant and Lufthansa's seat allignment in comparison to window is off with about 70% of the window seats.
In a proper or neat sitting position I had about two fingers from knee to seat with me being 1.83m tall, however in a comfortable sitting position I was hitting the seat with my knees.
Seat 12F is not properly alligned with the window like so many rows on this bird as the window started around my shoulder, but this is the view from a 90 degree angle with an Embraer of Air Dolomiti parked next to us. Let's say that I had a bit of a neck cramp after the departure from having my head in the wrong position for too long :).
While checking my seat out, the aircraft was still in the process of boarding passengers.
The aircraft is however equiped with individual air vents , a reading light and a call-to-flight attendant button that you have to share with your neighbour. I must admit for the age of the aircraft, the cabin was in a good general state with no signs of wear and tear, which is quite impressive for a 15.5 year old bird.
About ten minutes past our scheduled departure time, we were taxiing out for our departure to Amsterdam. Somewhere in the timespan of two hours, Munich decided to swap the direction of runways and we were rolling for departure from Runway 08L about 21 minutes past our scheduled departure time.
About twenty minutes into the flight, the flight attendants came by to hand out our complimentary bottle of water. While this particular service has been with Lufthansa on regional routes for years now, the drastic change to years ago is that even the bottle of waters have been drastically reduced to 0.3 ml bottles as they used to be 0.5 ml ones in the beginning/introduction of the Buy-on-Board service with Lufthansa.
The literature in the seat pocket on your seat consits of a buy on board magazine, a duty free magazine, a safety card of the correct aircraft and a sick bag with a text asking for some small donation for charity works.
In-flight cabin view.
About forty minutes into the flight, the two flight attendants came by again to provide us with a complimentary chocolate with a Lufthansa design on them, however the chocolate itself is rather of cheap produce and is not really memorable.
To my surprise the flight attendants didn't do any clean up service and when I wanted to hand out my empty botte to one of the flight attendant to what looked like a clean up service, she told me to leave it in the seat pocket in front of me.
With about fifteen minutes left into the flight, we started to notice a change into the attitude of the aircraft where we disappeared into clouds for a solid ten minutes, which was also quite bumpy with a touchdown at Runway 06 about three minutes ahead of schedule.
Runway 06 is probably the prefered runway for Lufthansa as this also means that we have a very very short ride to our gate and to my surprise we were using the right hand side (southerly) of the B-pier rather than the usual left hand (northern) where Lufthansa is usually departing from.
The last view of the aircraft and while I love the design of the CRJ, the comfort is simply not there.
Eventually made it up to the terminal where we have quite the walk to the baggage claim.
After a 15-20 minutes walk to the baggage claim, it took another 5 to 10 minutes or so for luggages to appear. Once collected, I was quickly on my way to home as my wife was already waiting for me.
Thanks for stopping by!
