Sunday, December 3, 2017

Departing Heathrow (OS452 LHR-VIE) 2017.06.22

Returning from England back home. First leg: to Vienna and a short stop..

22 June 2017
OS452 (0905-1225) LHR-VIE
OE-LBA Airbus A321

I arrive at the airport with a time margin to get through all the controls. A quick walk around the general area of T2 and I head to the security check. The queue moves quickly and in no time I am on the other side. I must admit I really like how T2 is constructed with the gates having a double entry for each "flight", with all the clear markings and information. Exact gate shown around 1h before departure (when the inbound flight arrives) so gate changes are rather rare. My plane arrives from Vienna slightly delayed, our first delay is shown to be 13 minutes. But 13 minutes past departure time boarding is still in progress... It is important to me as I have a 35 minute (scheduled time) change in Vienna, so every minute counts. After all we pushback with a delay of 35 minutes, so my entire stop just disappeared. The taxi process to the northern runway is long and involves many stops. Heavy traffic, what can you do. With some hopes still left at the back of my head I sit back, relax and enjoy the flight. The A321 inside doesn't differ form the A320, luckily the seat next to me is vacant giving me some more comfort on board. When we get closer to Vienna I start browsing the inflight magazine searching for rerouting options as I am nearly sure that I won't make my flight. During the approach the purser informs that some connections will unfortunately not make it, and says which. After all we get to our gate 7 minutes before my planned departure, when I get to the terminal the flight to Warsaw isn't even on the screens anymore. Bad luck. So I head to the transfer desk where after a couple of minutes I get a new boarding pass for the next flight to Warsaw (4 hours later), which after all ended up to be the fastest way anyway. After my asking I also get a 12€ worth of voucher for food and drinks and some of the restaurants.
Summing up the flight: the inflight experience was standard, same as the A320. The crew was friendly and Heathrow was Heathrow :D The Austrian ground staff in Vienna was very professional, for what I thank them. There is nothing I could say went bad in Vienna.


Entrance to T2
Checkin area of T2
Central area of T2
Gate area
The new BCS3 of Swiss heading for Geneva
We are off


Passing some Cbs during our climb out of LHR



OE-LMK
OE-LGE
A row of Q400s at VIE

Other segments:
OS626
OS461
OS631

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