Hello all,
After a short diversion with my employee due to weather, I finished my duty for the day in Dusseldorf Airport and was told my operations to proceed home and charge it to their account. Finished quite early, I proceeded myself to Dusseldorf Airport's trainstation to catch a trainride back to home (which takes about 2.5 hours in total), only to find out that all train connections to the Netherlands were stopped due to an interruption on both the Venlo & Emmerich crossing and that the earliest option to catch a trainride home would be around 10 pm.
Spoken to my operations and knowing the fact that I had to be home on friday eve the latest, I decided to book myself on a KLM flight which my company will fully refund, so I needed to proceed back to the terminal via Dusseldorf's skytrain and wait a few hours to catch my flight.
Given the importance of my return home due to a mandatory meeting on saturday morning at 8 am, I found the tickets of KLM quite expensive as they were going to charge me 350 EUR for a flight of 30 minutes, so I made an exception and used my miles (4.500 + Tax of 38 EUR) for work to buy me on the 18.40 flight.
Dusseldorf's airport terminal on landside gives a pleasant atmosphere unlike most German airports, but has some minor flaws too. Luckily enough with 3.5 hours to kill, the check-in counters of Air France-KLM were already open and I could drop off my luggage as soon as possible. The ground attendant was friendly towards me, but made a controversial joke to me in reference to two Asian ladies to my left who were denied to board due to the fact that they did not obtain an E-Visa for South Korea, while according to them were just staying transit and would continue in Seoul with a different airline on a different itinerary.
After dropping off my bag, I proceeded to the security which was quite a breeze and took not more than a few minutes to clear.
Two birds of Pegasus were being readied for a flight to sunnier and better destinations, although the tail of that Boeing 737 of Pegasus could do with a new paintjob.
The airport was completely deserted after security with only a few passengers strolling around and about 2 or 3 shops opened with two of them being food related. The only restaurant that was open was not allowed to serve passengers in their seating area, but was only allowed to give us a take away box, which meant that we would just sit a few meters further in the normal seating area eating our lunch/dinner. See the controversy here?
Plenty of seating available.
Our gate for departure would be from B77, which gaves us a pretty good view of the active runway 05R with a Turkish A321 taxiing to it's stand from Istanbul, however our gate was shortly before departure changed to Gate B75.
No announcements were made regarding the gate change, but this aircraft did make me re-check our active gate. Even though it is the same type of aircraft for my flight, it just doesn't look particularly blue.
Boarding was called on-time and went quite speedy with no long waiting lines. Our flight would be performed by PH-EZN, which at the time of flying is an 11,8 year old Embraer E-190 jet and has solely been in service to KLM Cityhopper.
The old E-Jets of KLM still provide a decent legroom and decent patching of their seat.
While legroom and the patching of the seat is quite decent, the age of the cabin is clearly visible on the seats.
Boarding was completed within 10 minutes and the flight was not nearly as full as it could be. Payload was about 50% I'd say.
Even though we were already 15 minutes ahead of schedule, the pilots announced that they tried their best, but pushback would happen on the scheduled time as an earlier departure would result in a longer flightroute than planned. Platform however was pretty quiet with an Iberia A320 readying for a flight to Madrid and an Eurowings sitting idle.
Eight minutes past our departure time we were airborne for our 30 minute flight to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.
Ten minutes after departure, the flight attendants came out to serve us some crisps and a small bottle of water. No drink service was provided given the short flight.
Literature in the seat pockets contained a safety card, sickbag and KLM's magazine with the current edition being focused mostly on the African continent.
As said, Payload was about 50% or so.
By this time we were already in approach to Runway 36R and it was quite busy in Amsterdam Airspace, however the picture below doesn't do justice to what our eyes saw with lots of planes crossing each other at different levels. You're only able to vaguely spot them.
Landing was smooth with a short ride to our gate. Those Embraer gates conected to the terminal do provide you with an excellent view of the aircraft you've been on. Goodbye EZN!
Though these Embraer gates will take you quite a while to reach baggage claim or even the intercontinental gates as it's one of the furthest piers of the airport.
Baggage claim 13 was in use and it took not more than five minutes for my baggage to arrive… Possibly I was the only one with luggage to be dropped off in Amsterdam as I'm sure that 99% of the passengers were connecting passengers to distant destinations.
Compared to Dusseldorf, Amsterdam Airport was crowded and very active with mostly all shops (airside) open. Though it was time for me to grab a train back home from the station below.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hi Thomas, great report as always!
It is difficult to judge on such a short hop, but I agree with your assessment. You mostly only have seat comfort and a quick impression of cabin crew friendliness to go on. Having a snack on such a quick flight in indeed above average, especially these days!
The cabin is definitely showing its age, a far cry from the brand new E2s! Luckily, the seats are still comfortable.
Thanks for sharing!
It does, however I made a suggestion in one of their surveys to use more local products on those type of flights. I think a ''Stroopwafel'' would suit more on such a route and gives somewhat of a Dutch touch to the service instead of those salty crisps. Thanks for stopping by!