Flying the Speedbird A320 from Luxembourg to London
I haven't been traveling by plane an awful lot in 2025, so I wasn't able to write and publish any new reports since my last one in March but I'm planning on changing that for 2026. So with that, only a couple of days into the new year we'll be checking out what British Airways' A320 is like on short-haul flights. Is it a viable option to connect from minor Airports or should you avoid it? Today I'll find exactly that out.
Good morning and welcome from icy Luxembourg - Findel Airport. With the heavy snow turning into rain I decided to leave the rainy weather behind and go to a country with notoriously worse weather. Or something like that. I decided to visit London for a couple of days after I completed the first step of the Lufthansa Pilot-Cadet aptitude assessments, the DLR-Exam, to take a break from studying and to joke on my friends who are sitting in Uni while I waste money and go to England. And with that I decided to take BA's A320 for a spin. Originally I wanted to combine it with Luxair's Dash 8 to London-City, but booking both itineraries as one-way tickets would have cost me both of my kidneys, so decided against it and booked the Airline I've never flown on, British Airways.
But enough yapping, lets get started with todays flight. Luckily my dad was able to drive me to the airport so I was able to save 60€ on parking and the 20 minute bus ride from the Economy Parking to the Terminal. But on the other hand we got stuck in rush hour and took 1h 30min for a route that would only take me 40min on a regular day.
Taking a look at the, arguably pretty boring looking, departure screen I can already see my flight BA419, here marked as QR8360. The one and only terminal at Luxembourg Airport is definitely one of my favorites, if you are not departing at 6 am, when all the Luxair Holiday flights leave in a matter of 5 minutes. Now at 8:30 the Airport is not particularly quiet, but very calm and definitely not crowded.
Taking a peek at the check-in area you can see the queue for my flight, which I was luckily able to skip, as I was only traveling with hand luggage. So I directly headed to the left-hand security checkpoint. There was no line, so I was straight through the checkpoint in matter of at max 2 minutes. But on the other hand, the staff was not particularly friendly. E.g. the officers started giving me instructions in French, which I do not speak and when I communicated that I couldn't understand her in both French and English she didn't care and only continued talking to me in French, now only in a significantly more annoyed tone. The other staff was also not particularly communicative and didn't give any instructions or said anything to me, so I definitely can't praise the customer service here.
Right after passing the security checkpoint, I started heading towards my Gate A05, which was located in the non-schengen area of the Airport. To get there I had to pass through passport control. Right before the checkpoint, there was a border patrol officer who asked me if I was a EU-Citizen and then directed me to the correct line (which was not a line, I was the only one in the checkpoint at the time) and wished me a nice flight and safe travels. It doesn't take much, but a little friendliness and social engagement goes a long way in the flying experience, for me at least. So instead of screaming at passengers in angry French, which many don't understand, just a handful of words can significantly improve the airport experience. The passport check wasn't much. I passed through the automated passport control for EU-citizens and so I made my way from the passenger drop-off into the international Gate area in under 10 minutes, which is a personal record. That on the other hand meant, that I still had to spend 90 minutes in the pretty bare boned waiting area.
As much as I usually enjoy the Schengen-Area of the Airport, which I've flown from countless times, the international Zone is only essentials. There is some seating, a kiosk / Drinks / Snacks shop and the 5 gates. That's it. It's not made to handle more than 1 Flight at a time. Now imagine a whole A350 or 787 being handled here with all passengers waiting in this area and the debarking passengers going through at the same time. And then there is another A320 / 737 being handled here aswell. That was reality until December of last year with China Southern serving the Airport once per week with their A350. That doesn't sound very pleasant and I imagine it gets super crowded in this small space. But the size of the Area is really understandable for an airport this size, which mainly serves Schengen Flights. And for one International A320 the waiting area is perfectly sized.
So I waited for my plane to land and pull into the stand, which it did quite a bit ahead of schedule, so everything was going smoothly. Today's ride is a 17.1 Year old Airbus A320-232 with the IAE V2500 engines registered G-EUYD. At 9:30 Luxembourg Time boarding started to slowly get on the way with priority groups starting first. Something I will never understand is how there are 7 different Boarding groups on an A320. 4 of those only for priority guests. I was part of group 5 but in the end still one of the first economy passengers on board. Something interesting I noticed while boarding was, this was the very first time I boarded a plane at Luxembourg via a jetbridge, even though I have flown from here countless times.
Boarding went pretty smoothly and the cabin crew stood ready at the entry to greet every passenger personally. So I decided to ask them if I could visit the flight deck after Landing in Heathrow, to which they offered me to come upfront immediately but I happily declined as I wanted to still be able to comfortably stow away my luggage, which would have been a little more stressful if I had waited for longer.
My seat for this coparatively short flight over to the United Kingdom was 6F. Talking about British Airways's hard product, I much prefer it over what e.g. Lufthansa as a comparable competitor has to offer. The main advantage that the seats have is very obvious. The headrest. It doesn't look like a huge step, especially not on a 1h 30min hop over the English Channel, but trust me it is. BA's cabin in general looks a lot more comfortable than what LH has to offer. The all-black leather-like finish of the seats looks much better than the wrinkly almost clumsy lookin seats Lufthansa installed in their A320 family at the same time. As you can see In the images above, the seat features a standard tray table, a seat-back pocket and a literature compartment, which features a buy-on-board menu and the safety-card. To be fair about the safety card, I'm not a huge fan of the design they used on them, it doesn't fit the premium look of the rest of the cabin and looks more like it could've been used by Spirit in the early 2000's, but it definitely does its job. This is something Lufthansa, or the Lufthansa Group in general does much better, (just design wise), but so far this and only that, nothing else. The legroom was about fine for me with my 186 cm or 6'1"" in freedom units. The HUGE benefit was that the flight was anything but fully booked and the entire row behind me remained empty so I could make full use of the seats recline margin without feeling guilty, which made the flight much more comfortable. I can use any inch of extra space I can get in a short haul economy seat. Something I usually really praise on Airline Seats is the availability of USB ports and universal power outlets. And of those every row of 3 seats had 2. That by itself is really good, and, more importantly, something that the likes of Lufthansa doesn't offer. But that was all that was positive about it, because the one next to my seat was in fact defective and didn't work. So I had to use my power bank to keep my phone from dying. The last and perhaps one of the most telling points about a seat is its cleanliness. And with this one, it was very decent. Not perfect, but there was nothing nasty, and that's the main part. Otherwise, just the usual you would expect after a 45 min turnaround, so everything was good for my scale. But with everything said about the seat, let's get a couple of words about the cabin crew in. Not much to say except they were amazing. Offering help and informing other passengers who needed physical assistance in Heathrow by informing them of the current schedule and offered services, or the generally friendly mood that they spreaded through the cabin where really benefitial for the whole flight experience.
Whit that said, let's just jump to the safety instruction and pushback. Nothing special to mention there, except the crew did a brilliant job on that aswell. So, let's just take a quick look at what aircraft are there to see on the ground at ELLX. Notable is the lonely Embraer E195-E2 registered as LX-LEA standing on the apron awaiting its maiden revenue flight towards Milan in a few days. That's going to be a brand new chapter for Luxair, the E2 is definitely something to check out in the future. But for now this trip has somewhat emptied my wallet and I am pretty sure there will be more than enough time left to check it out sometime in the future. With that said, let's take-off and see what our flight has to offer.
Quite interesting was that we didn't taxi for long and lined up at the holding point of taxiway Charlie for a take-off from Runway 24, towards the west. This is particularly interesting because this is a procedure typically only done by Dash 8's or E-Jets, because any lager aircraft usually taxies the whole way towards the threshold and lines up either via A or A2. What this specifically tells us is that we were particularly lightweight on this flight, which enabled us to get out of Luxembourg quicker, but also made us more sensitive towards any turbulence, of wich there luckily was almost none. But enough nerding out about the departure procedures in Luxembourg, let's just get on with the flight or reading this report might take longer than the flight itself (writing it definitely did many times). So enjoy the views I was able to caputre after departure.
While we were slowly reaching our cruising altitude and the crew was starting to roll out the catering some snowy views of northern Luxembourg and the Belgian Ardenne Mountains started to emerge between the otherwise quite dense cloud layer below us.
The "meal" service consisted of a 200ml / 6,7 fl. oz. bottle of spring water, which was refrigerated and a small Flapjack oat bar. It's not much but still, it's a short flight and what BA offers is still more than the simple tiny chocolate bar that Lufthansa hands their passengers on similar routes. Right after they went around with to collect orders from the buy-on-board menu, which did not receive a lot of interest by the fellow passengers. Talking about that, the price points were ok. Not cheap but not extremely expensive, I've definitely seen worse.
Something that stood out to me was how clean and shiny those IAE engines looked. Maybe I've never properly noticed it before or the plane had undergone some maintenance not too long ago, but I've never seen such a clear reflection of the Aircraft itself in the Engine.
Shortly after the cabin crew finished the service and collected all that remained from said service, we already started our descend into the deep cloud layer covering southern England and joined the traffic patterns of Heathrow. We did the typical approach on Runway 27R over downtown London, which usually offers great views of all the famous buildings London is known for, but not today, as the entire city was completely covered in a thick fog layer.
After roughly 1h 5min we touched down on a very wet London Heathrow Airport. The landing itself was reasonably firm, as is standard procedure when the Runway is contaminated.
Smooth landings have a higher risk of aquaplaning, so when the runway is contaminated (wet / icy / snowy) pilots typically land a bit firmer to avoid aquaplaning and improve stopping distance (not because the Runway is short at LHR, but to minimize the time spent on the Runway to allow for a faster arrival flow)
After vacating the Runway I realized that we were not moving anywhere but staying on the Taxiway, waiting. The reason for that was, that our scheduled arrival time was 10:55 a.m. and we already landed at 10:24 a.m. resulting in us being 30 minutes early. Very nice for connecting passengers, but what that also meant was, that our initially planned arrival gate was still occupied by a departing aircraft, so we had to move to a remote stand instead. In that weather, not really amazing as I don't think Heathrow has any covered airstairs, available at T3 as almost no flights here are handled at remote stands. But that was nobody's wrongdoing and it wouldn't help blaming the crew or the airport for this, as this was just a minor inconvenience that was caused by neither of both.
After we arrived at the stand I waited for the first portion of passengers to get off and onto the bus to the terminal and then made my way to the front to have a chat with the pilots and check out the flight deck. It was just a very brief visit as they were doing their turnaround and visiting the flight deck on a remote stand isn't really that convenient, so it was just a chat and I made my way down to the bus.
So one last look at our Aircraft and lets head into the terminal.
One last look at the apron before we vanish in the depths of Terminal 3. What I really didn't like about it is that you basically dont see daylight between the point where you leave the Aircraft and you leave the Terminal. It feels quite depressing to be honest. That meant for me, that I basically didn't see daylight until my train left the airport tunnel somewhere east of Heathrow. But I'll talk about the traffic situation in the report for the flight back.
With that I passed through immigrations which was super quick and easy, as there are those electronic gates with automated passport checks for some nationalities, including EU citizens, which I am. From the passport check it was a quick way through the baggage reclaim area, which I was able to skip and so I made my way directly to the Station to head towards London with the Elizabeth Line.
