Hi,
On the day prior to my flight I received a notification from the office that I was required to position on the following Sunday to Ostend in Belgium as I was required for a different aircraft next week. As I was currently residing at Malmo Airport, this isn't an easy task though to find a decent flight from there.
Office eventually found me a reasonable ticket with KLM from Copenhagen to Brussels via Amsterdam as all direct flights to Brussels were either sold out or extremely expensive. There were a few flights at 6 am departing out of Copenhagen to Brussels, but due to crew rest' regulation, I was legally not able to take them nor did I fancy waking up at 2 am to head over.
So the start of this flight report starts from Malmo Airport where I took a bus at 11.50 AM (as it was the last one I could catch to be in time for my flight from Copenhagen) and will drop you off at Malmo's Main Station in about 40 minutes for a total of 157 SEK ( +/- 15 EUR).
The bus itself is quite comfy and does offer plenty of legroom nor is it crowded as we only had about 10 passengers for our ride to Malmo.
Once arrived at Malmo's main station by bus, I decided to catch the earliest train that was departing to Copenhagen Airport for another 150 SEK (+/- 14.5 EUR) which will give you a ride over the famous Oresund's bridge and will bring you to Copenhagen Airport in approximately 20 minutes. It still amazes me that Copenhagen Airport is actually much closer to Malmo than Malmo's airport itself and is way more convenient to be used to get around.
Given that there was no need for me to check-in any luggage myself, I didn't need to go to terminal 2 where KLM's check-in counter is and could head upstairs immediately to security.
Unfortunately security wasn't as fast nor as efficient and took about 25 minutes or so to be cleared, though I noticed that Copenhagen Airport is currently busy upgrading their security machines to those where you do not need to take out any electronic device or so. Though it surprises me that they still wanted you to take out any liquids while other airports were usually fine keeping them in the bag.
As I had plenty of time to kill, I decided to head over to the Carlsberg Aviator Lounge, which I could access through my Priority pass, though I must admit that I'd give my preference to the Aspire lounge due to reasons you will find out soon.
Carlsberg Aviator Lounge is located on the 2nd floor between pier A & B. Once I made it up there, I was greeted by a very friendly receptionist and made my way to the lounge once all formalities were arranged. The issue is that the lounge was extremely busy to a point that there was almost no seating available. Once I found an available seat or so after five minutes, I made my way to the very limited buffet and beverage sector.
The good thing is that they do offer four different draught beers if you fancy one (with one of them being an alcohol free one).
A very limited liquor selection, some soft drinks and juices were available.
As one of the coffee machines was broken (could find another one in a different part of the lounge), they also had some filtercoffee available if you fancied that. Often this coffee is much better compared to the ones of the machines.
The lounge itself offers a very limited buffet with no hot food options. The photo below (minus bread) was the entire food offering available and contained only of some cheeses, salads, spreads and fruit.
So eventually the seat I found was on a table like that with plenty of movement around…
On the other side of the lounge you had another coffee machine, some draught beer and softdrinks available.
and some seatings (which also turns around the corner in the aft), though there was no chance to find a seat here as some people were actually running to catch seats when someone left….. A bit of an abysmal behaviour I must admit.
And as last a tiny selection of bread, which is rather disappointing.
After doing some work in the lounge, I decided to leave the lounge about 15 minutes to the scheduled boarding time. KLM is using the A-pier of Copenhagen, which isn't really too far from the lounge itself.
But by the time I reached the gate for our flight, there was no aircraft to be seen.
Though it didn't take long for it to appear. PH-NXF was the bird that was going to bring us over to the Netherlands. It is a 3.6 year old Embraer 195-E2 (At time of flying) and has solely been flying for KLM Cityhopper since it joined KLM's fleet in November 2021.
The seating arrangement is somewhat limited near our gate and becomes more limited if people do not give you space to occupy those empty seats, which tends to happen quite often at any airport to be fair. So instead of looking for a space to sit, I decided to stand to the wall and listen in to this huge arguement between a traveller and the ground attendant as the ground attendant was unable to help him get him on the current flight after a SAS flight was canceled to Amsterdam.
Boarding was called with a delay of approximately ten minutes and went quite smoothly. Upon embarking our aircraft, we were kindly greeted by two flight attendants who were attending to us the moment we boarded. My row wasn't occupied yet, so it gave me a chance to grab a quick photo of the seat I'm in today. Not the best alignment to the window nor is the padding that good compared to KLM's older embraers.
While the seat is lacking padding, the view out of our window is definitely greater and probably one of the better features of the E2 jets as windows are huge. The view from my seat isn't too shabby either though as the engine looks quite humongous compared to the wing for a jet of this size.
As I said before that padding is definitely reduced compared to their older E-Jets, it does mean that the legroom is a tad better though and for a short flight of 1 hour, this is not an issue at all.
The aircraft is also equiped with an individual USB-A plug to power your devices and could be found in front of you.
Individual air vents are also available in the panel above your head and this is a feature I'd say is better designed on the E-jet if you're seated on an aisle seat comparing it to an A220. If you are seated on an aisle seat in the row where three seats are next to each other, the individual air vent is quite a distance away from your seat making it an useless feature for that specific seat in my opinion.
Literature could be found in the seat pocket in front of you and contains of KLM's magazine ''Holland Herald'', a safety card and a sick bag. It's still nice to see that KLM is using a paper version of their magazine, yet I wonder for how long?
The most interesting page on KLM's magazine with their newest bird the A321neo as the main character on their page.
Table was clean and passed the inspection.
View of the cabin when everyone was seated.
Pushback was engaged only four minutes past our scheduled departure time.
About ten minutes later or so we were lining up Runway 04R for a northerly departured followed by a quick right hand turn to fly the long way around in a southwesterly direction.
Given that we were on the right hand side of the aircraft, It gave us a nice view over the ''Oresund'' Bridge which I crossed earlier today by train with Malmo on the left hand side.
About fifteen minutes into the flight, the flight attendants came around to serve us our complimentary snack and drink service and I opted for a coke. This was served with a cheese sandwich, yet isn't the most enjoyable thing one can have.
As the flight itself went smoothly, I forgot to report earlier that the seat is also equiped with a cup holder in case you don't want to fold out your table.
About 20 minutes to landing, flight attendants came around to clean the cabin and prepare us for landing as we were already descending into Amsterdam for an arrival ahead of time.
Touchdown about 8 minutes ahead of schedule on 36R.
Given that our aircraft was continuing to London after our flight, I already knew we were going to park in the ''Old Fokker Bay'' and probably now known as the ''Embraer Bay'' for operational reasons as it was easier to ship passengers by buses to aircraft rather than towing an aircraft to a different gate.
One last look of the bird that brought us over from Copenhagen.
And off to the Privium Lounge as I had about three hours for my onward flight to Brussels.
