Avis du vol entre London et Luxembourg en classe Economique avec British Airways

Late evening hop on the Speedbird A320 to Luxembourg

Can BA deliver consistently on short haul or was the last time just a one-off experience? I guess that's the question we're going to answer today.

Good afternoon and welcome to this trip report from London - Paddington Station. You might ask yourself now, what, this is a flight report, what's he doing at a train station? And to that there is one simple answer. I wanted to start this report by talking about the Airport Transfer Situation at London Heathrow. But before we do that, lets leave the surprisingly beautiful weather behind and head into the station.

There used to be two main options to get from Downtown London to Heathrow Airport. Taking the arguably lengthy journey on the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground or going via mainline rail and taking the Heathrow Express, which offered much better comfort and is much quicker than the tube. That's also the main option that is advertised, here at Paddington and at Heathrow. When you enter the station building you're directly greeted by dotted lines with the Heathrow Express logo on that lead you directly to their ticket booths and the departure track for the services. The same goes for the Terminals over at LHR. Everywhere you go you're greeted by adverts and people with purple vests that sell tickets on the go. The journey from Paddington to LHR with Heathrow Express will set you back about £ 26,50 if booked in the day of travel. That's quite a hefty sum in my eyes. But in the last couple of years, there has been a new addition to Londons public transit network, that has completely changed that situation.

The Elizabeth Line. For me it was an easy choice to pick it over the other two options, as it is still much faster and spacious than the Piccadilly Line service but still at about £16 much cheaper, than buying a ticket to the Heathrow Express on the go. But enough about the transit situation in London, lets get to Heathrow.

It was a really beautiful day in London for it being January, and surprisingly the sun even came out and served us a beautiful sunset over the more or less picturesque landscape along the Great Western Mainline.

After about 40 minutes on the train I ended up at Heathrow Central Station, just below the parking garages between terminals 2 and 3. From there I made my way through the tunnels of the station towards Terminal 3. 

After that short walk I ended up infront of T3, which arguably looks very nice and modern from the outside. But that whole impression changes once you enter it. Every single piece of  criticism that you'll hear about Heathrow definitely applies to T3. You can tell it's an old terminal originally built in the 60s / 70s. It looks modern but structurally it feels ancient even though it was modernized in 2007. Its low ceiling in the check-in area gives it a very tight, oppressive feel. Most airports are much better in that regard. Frankfurt for example, where Terminal 1 originates from a similar time. Still feels grand and open even though it's not larger and in most portions also doesn't feature higher ceilings. 
Additional to the already very condensed feeling the sheer passenger numbers that move through T3 at LHR make the space feel incredibly crowded and confusing to navigate. It doesn't help that there are signs for the security checks that lead to closed off stairways or nowhere at all. I'm not usually a person to struggle to navigate in airports or anywhere in general and if I say I feel something is hard to get around it means something is definitely wrong. Luckily I was only traveling with cabin luggage so I could skip the most crowded parts, the baggage drop-off and check-in area.

After searching for a bit I found myself infront of the security check area. The queue wasn't too long and I got to through reasonably quick. Something I definitely can't complain about is the thoroughness of the baggage check. My suitcase was flagged and hand searched. That initially confused me, as I was certain I had nothing that would be of any concern in my luggage. But turns out, I had a nail clipper, I didn't even know existed, in my bag. Naturally, as I didn't know about it, it made it through every single security check I had gone through in the last couple of months, or at least in Luxembourg a few days later. That on the other hand made me feel a bit concerned. They missed this nail clip EVERYWHERE except at Heathrow. What else do they not notice? The staff that searched my stuff was exceptionally friendly and let me keep the nail clip in the end, making a quick joke about it and going on with their day. 

Now let's get to the worst part about T3 at LHR. Seating. If you go through security you end up directly in the main hall, which has very limited seating, especially for the volume of wide body, long haul flights, and some shops. Usually not a problem, as at most airports you can find some seating close to your gate or at least somewhere in the vicinity. It's a slightly different story in Heathrow. 1: You are not communicated your gate until about 45 min before off-block departure. That's about 15 minutes before boarding. That would be fine if there was adequate seating throughout the terminal, but the gate-area seating is all closed off when the gate isn't in use and you are not allowed to enter to sit down, as the boarding-pass check is before you enter the gate area, not before you board. So effectively you can use those seats for approximately 5 to at most 10 minutes before your flight. And finding other seats? Almost impossible. I ended up coincidentally walking towards the concourse, where my gate was going to be and the open area featured a minuscule amount of seats for the amount of gates there were. But as I had about 90 minutes until I assumed boarding would start I made my way through the terminal and bought a snack and sat down In a quiet area, again which had just one bench and waited. 

After a while I received a Flighty notification telling me that my gate was announced. And just a few seconds later the gate popped up in the App. When I went to sit at the gate, I was greeted with this.

Nothing. A blank screen and a broken chair. So I stood there and waited. After about 5 minutes some staff went into the gate area and I asked them if this was the gate to Luxembourg. They confirmed and after they made everything ready I was the first passenger through. This opens one question for me. If you already have the gate confirmed in your system, as seen by the fact that it was already showing in flighty almost 15 minutes before it was announced on any passenger information screen, why do you not tell your passengers. Does it make a difference if people wait standing for an hour in the already overcrowded main hall or if they stand in an empty concourse with no flights in the next 2 hours. This is something I will never understand. A pleasant surprise was, that the pilots were also waiting in the passenger area (why that was is still a mystery to me) and greeted the first few passengers personally, until they got on board themselves.

After the pilots left, the gate are quickly became busy. The passengers that arrived from Toulouse got off and a couple minutes after the last passengers debarked and the crew changed, the boarding slowly started to get on the way. As usual it was done in the typical groups 0 to 6 system, I already found strange on my previous BA flight. So Club Europe passengers got to board first before I was allowed onto the plane, as I was sitting in a window seat in the front of the plane.
Our plane for this 1h 18min hop over to the grand duchy is G-TTOE, a 24 Year old Airbus A320-200, that was originally delivered to GB Airways in 2002. 

Precisely G-TTOE is an Airbus A320-232, equipped with 2 IAE V2527-A5 engines

So I sat down in Seat 8A for this flight. As I said in my previous report on the BA A320 the seats have a really high quality look are really comfortable. They easily beat Lufthansas old product (I haven't checked out the new seats they've slowly been rolling out to their A320 family aircraft). 

The legroom was also pretty good for me at 186 cm or 6'1"" in freedom units. The seat area was also pretty clean and well maintained. Pretty much everything I said about the seats on my flight to London also applies now. Except one thing. The power outlet works this time. So overall a very good hard product once again. But enough talk about the seat, lets skip the boring stuff and get straight to taxi and takeoff.

This particular A320 is equipped with 180 B/E Aerospace Pinnacle seats which are 18" wide. All seats other than rows 10 and 11 recline to up to 3". The seat spacing on my particular seat is 30". (source aerolopa.com)

Thanks to the guys over at AeroLOPA for letting me share the information from their site in my reports. If you are like me and are mostly dissatisfied with the seat maps most Airlines provide, check out their site. They have high quality seat maps for most airlines and also provide additional information, airlines usually don't give you like seat warnings, recline features and other notable things. They really help me in picking where I want to sit on an aircraft.

Now we were pushed back out of our stand and started our taxi towards Runway 09R.

And like this we made our initial climb out of a now very rainy Heathrow Airport. We shortly leveled out at about FL050 and flew around London. A very comfort boosting circumstance was that the flight was not very full and I lucked out with an empty middle seat and the seat behind mine unoccupied. So, extra room for my legs and reclining my seat as much as I want without bothering anybody. An interesting thing I noticed was that the seats were more up-straight than others I had noticed so far or I was just tired as hell and wanted to lay back and rest, but anyways being able to recline guilt-free is always nice.

After a little while the "meal" service came around. Everybody in Economy Class was handed a 0.25 l bottle of spring water and a Golden Oat Biscuit. Not much, but to be honest you don't need more on such short of a flight. So after finishing this little snack I powered down and listened to an audiobook while cruising over a thick cloud cover over Belgium. That is also the reason why there is almost no other photos of the flight In this report. Combine a full cloud cover, dark sky and a lit up airplane cabin, what do you get? Darkness with a whole lot of interior reflections from the cabin. Not a particularly interesting motif for a photo in my opinion. So we cruised on until we reached our top of descend and started the approach into Luxembourg.

Our approach into Luxembourg was unusually interesting and eventful and this is where I will get a bit nerdy, so if you don't care about operational procedures and only care about the whole travel experience, feel free to skip the next chapter and read on below the landing video.

We approached Luxembourg from the northwest and flew along, from what I interpreted in the route shown on flightradar24, the STAR REMB3D towards the waypoint DIK (Diekirch).

A STAR (Standard Terminal Arrival Route) is a path that takes your aircraft from the last waypoint of your regular flight plan towards your final approach and gives the Aircraft routing information as well as altitude and speed constraints.

To reach Runway 25 we took, what I suspect was the ILS/LOC Y approach, which includes the transition route shown in the image above. So it usually takes you first a bit to the southwest of DIK to then make a smooth turn at the base of the approach to intercept the ILS a good bit before the final approach fix LX06F. That is done to sequence arrivals and allow for better spacing between landing aircraft coming from different directions and is usual practice at almost any airport. But as we were arriving pretty late in the evening, there was not a huge amount of arrivals at a time and the sequencing wasn't necessary. So as the little box that can be seen in the corner of the cutout indicates, the pilots should expect radar vectors. That means they'll be assigned a course by ATC that will lead them to the Approach Fix. That was the case aswell on our flight. We took, what I assume was a direct from somewhere  behind D3.9DIK towards D9.0LUX which meant we were approaching the airport at a 90° angle to the Runway and ILS Localizer Path. That route caused us to arrive at the Fix a couple minutes earlier than expected. The pilots either didn't notice or they just forgot to tell the cabin crew about it, so that resulted in them still in the middle of cleanup while we were on short final. They managed to rush back to their seats just in time but, as something that never happened on any of my flights, the cabin lighting remained on full brightness during landing, and it was pitch black outside. So getting some landing footage without filming just reflections of me and the other people in my row was a bit challenging, but in the end I still managed to get some half-decent footage of our touchdown.

So like that we touched down rather hard in Luxembourg. The cause for that is that the runway is very heavily sloped and perfermorming a smooth landing here is near impossible for a pilot who isn't used to this runway and flies there often. And with BA having a very expansive network, they serve with their A320 family I assume the pilots here weren't all to experienced with ELLX in particular, so the hard landing may be excused.

And just like that we arrived at our stand after a very short taxi. Not being in a rush I waited until most passengers were off the plane and headed to the flight-deck to pay the pilots a visit and ended up having a chat with the really nice captain who gave me some life advice for my own pilot career path I am currently working towards.

Now we take a last short look at our plane before heading through the comparatively empty terminal towards immigrations. 

The passport checks were very straightforward and for me as a EU citizen everything went smoothly and I was through in a matter of a single minute. As I was only traveling with my hand luggage I was able to skip baggage claim and headed straight out of the terminal, making my way from the plane to the outside of the terminal in just around 5 minutes. That's why I absolutely love traveling from small airports like Luxembourg.