Review of Lufthansa CityLine flight London → Frankfurt in Economy

As I had to follow a course back in Mainland Europe, I booked Lufthansa's flight LH 937 from London City to Frankfurt Am Main with a departure of 19:20.

While I was directly at London Southend Airport due to my work, I was forced to travel to a different airport as London Southend does not connect to Frankfurt. At the trainstation of London Southend, I booked a train ticket with Greateranglia to Stratford.



After a ride of approximately 45 minutes, I now ended up at Stratford. Here you have to proceed to platform 17 to grab a Dockland's Light Railway (DLR) train to London City, which is quite an uncomfortable ride as I mentioned in one of my previous reports, but only takes about 15 minutes or so.



While arriving at the airport, you are now required to have a short walk to the terminal.



Though the moment you are entering the terminal, you already know whether it is going to be a packed terminal for now or yet a quiet. Unfortunately at the departure of my flight, it is going to be high peak with many flights leaving London to Europe.



While I decided to tag my bag myself and to drop it off at one of those self-drop off counters, the system completely froze up with the passenger in front of me forcing us to use one of their manned counters. This took another 10 minutes before being served. Once I finally dropped my luggage, I decided to grab a cup of coffee with Costa before heading to security.

After my cup of coffee I did decide to head up to security, which took a while to clear as the scanner went off with me and their bodyscan system completely froze up (another system that froze….).

While waiting around 90 minutes for my flight to depart, I decided to walk around and do some spotting (even though it was very very busy and little spots were available to capture aircraft).

A FlyBe ATR 72-500 operated by Blue Islands.


A Luxair Dash 8-400, KLM Cityhopper E-190 and a BA Cityflyer E170 to depart


One of CityJet's Avro was arriving from Dublin.


An Helvetic Embraer 190 ready to board their passengers to Zurich.


Meet D-AECE, an 8.5 year old Embraer, who has only served Lufthansa Cityline in it's existence and was going to bring us to Frankfurt today. Unfortunately it was already delayed by 40 minutes upon arrival as both pilots informed us that Frankfurt was not able to release them on-time.


Boarding was initiated about 20 minutes later and it was going to be a full flight.

Another KLM Cityhopper E190 was parking next to us. While KLM was previously outsourcing their LCY flights to CityJet, they made sure once their contract was over to come back in full force with their own aircraft.



Did decide to board via the backstairs as that was suppose to be the quickest way to my seat, but apparently people are still refusing to listen to ground staff as to what stairs to take.



Legroom was very decent



Ten minutes later, we were fully loaded and ready to light up the engines to start our journey to Frankfurt.



After a short safety introduction, the aircraft moved a few meters to the holding point of RWY 09. A minute or two later, we were cleared to line up RWY 09, which gave us a pretty nice view of London's skyline (unfortunately my phone does not capture it that well)



A few seconds later, the powerful engines spooled up and we were off for an easterly departure to Frankfurt Am Main



About 10 minutes into flight, one of the young flight attendants started to serve us a sandwich (Cheese or Chicken), while the other one started to serve us drinks. I opted for a chicken sandwich, which was a rather disappointment as the taste was very poor.



Once the sandwiches were served, the other flight attendant started to serve drinks now as well. I opted for a beer and I was rather surprised. It has been a very longtime for me to actually see a bottle of beer instead of those cans. Well done Lufthansa!



While drinking my beer, I decided to read Lufthansa's magazine of September, which was a nice read.



Now it was time for our approach into Frankfurt.



They did manage to gain some of their delay in-flight as it was now reduced to only 15 minutes late. It took about ten minutes to taxi to our remote stand in which we had to deboard our plane via stairs and be transported to terminal via a bus.



While reaching our terminal via bus, customs was a matter of seconds as we were the only aircraft arriving from a non-schengen country at that time and my luggage was on belt like 5 to 7 minutes later.