Review of Germanwings flight from St. Petersburg to Düsseldorf in Economy

from russia with love

Hello dear Flight Reporters and readers!
Today I will start a series of flights that took me from London to St Petersburg.

The particularity and interest of this routing is the variety of fleet types..

A quick touristic bonus with the Hermitage palace

The very famously known St Basils cathedral

And the architectural effort made in the tube stations..

at st petersburg - pulkovo airport

We arrived at the airport well in advance, to avoid any bad surprises at security.

We did checkin at the LH counter, despite the fact that the flight was operated with Germanwings.

We filled in some more papers and had our Boarding Pass printed.

We passed security and had another stamp on my visa/passport.

One of my friends went to the smoker corner, one was in the toilet and I went to the duty free section to buy some more vodka!

casual bomb threat

I was at the duty free, minding my own business and arrived at the till.

I saw some people running around and I thought some people really should arrive earlier at the airport to avoid running like chicken.
There was a lot of announces being made in Russian - some last minute gate number change?

The lady at the till looked at me like I was the weirdest person she ever saw. She spoke to me in Russian - no idea what she was saying.

She then said "you sure you want to buy?" 
"Yes why?"
"you don't listen to the announce? the building is to be evacuated"

This is how I understood there was a bomb scare, and moments later the Russian army came into the airport with dogs sniffing around and shouting at people..

My friend who went to the toilet was asked to go to the gate.
My friend who went for a smoke was asked to go outside
And I was told to go outside near the planes..

I only discovered this info about 30 min in later on, the amount of people calling prevented our phones to work properly.

It was like I was in a James Bond movie set.. Nobody spoke English, people were screaming, the Army was arresting random people… Really some scary moment. 

No information was given at all in english, a lot of confusion. People heard some people saying stuff… We only understood it was a bomb threat when some passengers started to share news like this one.

https://www.rt.com/news/176392-pulkovo-airport-evacuation-russia/

Litterally there has never been a announce in english about this. This was never confirmed to us.

After about 2 hours of being separated, not being able to reach each other; there finally were some announces being made in English saying to obey to the police officers and that more information will be given later LOL. 

After about 4 hours, the flights that were due were finally called for boarding and it was a massive mess as people were running to their gates.

Boarding happened in a messy way, let alone with priorities.

onboard the A319

Aircraft: Airbus A319-111
Registration: D-AVXQ
Engines: 2x CFM56
Age: now 13 Years
Layout: Y144

And the cabin, with different colours than the parent company.

It never felt so relieving to be onboard a plane, as we knew we were leaving behind this mess, and heading for a country where the rule of law applies..

The bad surprise though was to realise that there were no complimentary service being offered on Germanwings, despite the fact that we were booking with LH.

We took off very late so most of the flght happened at night..

We quietly landed at dusseldorf about 4 hours later.
I was a bit surprised and not in a good way that neither the captain nor the crew made any announce about what happened, and the reason we were late… 

at dusseldorf airport

and finally at our gate. Finally we were in Europe. Safe.

Of course we missed our connecting flight to London.

I must say the LH crew on cround asked us how we were, they heard what happened.
They were very professionnal, VERY. Rebooked us for the next morning flight, gave us voucher for food at the hotel and booked the hotel that was part of the football stadium.
They also gave us a paper explaining what had happened at LED airport.