Flights to Heathrow and Munich Airport

Let's have an insight to a couple of recent roundtrips!

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Heathrow

The week started with a roundtrip to London/Heathrow which is my favorite European airport in terms of air traffic. It's always a great opportunity to watch impressive aircraft that come from all points of the world map.

But even before proceeding to the aircraft I took a peek of this TAP's ATR72 through the window of our briefing room, at Lisbon Airport.

Then the usual routine followed, as well as the recurrent holding procedure to land at the congested Heathrow airport.

Turn during our hold

I don't have many photos of the aircraft movement I had the pleasure to watch at LHR. But I can tell about a Boeing 767 from Air Canada, a 737 Classic from LOT, a British Airways 747, some 787s, a couple of private (unidentified) 777s, a Korean A380, etc, etc.

Near us it was parked a regular A320 from Lufthansa with sharklets installed.

D-AIUM

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Munich

The next day it was time to go to Munich Airport/Franz Josef Strauss. I usually appreciate these roundtrips to Germany because the typical passengers of these flights are very easy to deal with. They bring few hand luggage (no problems with overloaded bins) and they seem to be familiar with air travel and comply with basic rules without having to alert them. However, our flight back to Lisbon was a little bit different from this standard. I'll tell why later!

Our aircraft, the A321 CS-TJG, arrived a little bit delayed from the previous flight. It parked close to our crew terminal at Lisbon airport.

The flight to Munich was an absolutely smooth one. It was also very fast due to strong tail wind.

Contrary to Heathrow, you do not see the same variety of airlines at Munich Airport. In fact, MUC is the second "kingdom" of Lufthansa in Germany.

A321 D-AIRA on our left

As a curiosity, the name of this Lufthansa A321 is "Finkenwerder", the name of the airport in Hamburg, where Airbus has a final assembly line for all models of the A320 family and where the same aircraft (plus the A380) get their cabin interiors fitted and are also painted.

A319 D-AILX on our right

During our turnaround time, the A321 was pushed back for its departure and later an amazing A340-600 from South African Airways came in.

A346 ZS-SNC - such a big aircraft

Window distortion...

The flight back to Lisbon was almost complete and many of the passengers were Bayern Munich's supporters that were going to watch live the Champions League's game opposing their club and SL Benfica, on the quarter-finals of the competion. That's why this time we had a little bit more work. Not a single beer can of our catering survived intact to this flight! Also, the flight time was almost one hour (!) longer due to the tail wind. But in the end everyone was happy!

After a long period on the long haul flight, it feels good to be back on the European routes!