Review of Iberia Regional (Air Nostrum) flight Madrid → Santander in Economy

introduction

Continuation of my trip from Paris to Santander in 2009; I found these old pictures from my first business trip and wanted to share it with you guys!

The policy of our company was generous at the time as they insisted only legacy carriers should be used and through the american express travel agency.

at madrid aldofo suarez - barajas airport

We arrived at Terminal 4 of Madrid Barajas from our Previous flight from Paris Orly.
The terminal was bright, colourful, and airy, and well organised, there are some ground staff helps you for direction if you have a connecting flight like we had. We just had a little over a hour of connecting flight so we didn't have too much time to explore the terminal.

We used the very long automatic walkways to reach the other gate of our second flight to Santander.

on board the dh8-300

Just before going to the gates I did a bit of spotting… Here an A320 I guess?

We boarded in a general way at the gates at the ground floor and reached the aircraft by bus, passing in front of a nice amount of planes lined up. When the bus approached an isolated aircraft; I realised that will be our aircraft that day: a dash8-300. I didn't know much about aviation at the time and I naively thought propellers jets didn't exist anymore and so here I was, boarding one and on top of it; seating on 5D was right next to the propeller!!

Aircraft: Bombardier DH8-300
Registration: EC-IBT
Engines: 2x PW123
Age: 8 Years (in 2009)
Observation: In 2009 Iberia was still using the old logo and old livery; and same for its regional airline, Air Nostrum.

The AvGEEK bit
Created as an independant airline based in Valencia in 1994, Air Nostrum became 3 years later the franchised regional airline of Iberia. Its fleet is composed of 6ATRs, 6CRJ200, 28 CRJ1000 (with a further 8 ordered). My first time in a CRJ, really pleased with it.

We were greeded by the captain and soon after a very professional annouce by him about the flight.

The crew explained in spanish the safety procedures.

We taxi'ed for a good amount of time before aligning on runway 36R.

With this fantastic view on the terminal 4. 

We taxi'ed for a good amount of time before aligning on runway 36R.

The purser and crew were only speaking spanish, and they were more smiling and kind than those of our first flight with the parent airline Iberia.

Climbing was faster than usual and after 10,000 feet, the fasten seat belts sign was turned off.

 Air Nostrum was giving complementary beverages and drinks.

The Iberia Magazine, Ronda, was fairly well written, though mostly in Spanish and a good amount of corporate news.

 I liked the Iberia magasine as it had a lot of techincal details about its fleet; you can really see some details about our cute little De Havilland 8 300 series (which became Bombardier).

The flight was very short although in my memories, very bumpy - maybe because i never experienced a propeller jet before?

Descent happened very fast and I remember us being on final over the sea before landing.

at santander airport

 Santander airport felt quite new and very clean, but with a very little amount of shops / services.
The luggages arrived very quickly after and we went to pick up our car from the rental company.