Trip report – never a dull FR moment!!

Hi All

Wingflaps2 and myself have just returned from a long weekend in Germany and thought we’d share our experiences with you. We need to get this off of our chests, I tells ya!!

Now, before anyone accuses me of just good ol’ Ryanair-bashing, I must stress that I have always accepted that Ryanair can only sell such cheap flights by cutting out (or charging separately) for certain expensive services and that sometimes things can go wrong (like when they cancelled our flight home from a daytrip from Girona-Stansted in January!) and you need to sort things out yourself. Although it may be annoying, I still accept it. However, it seems this particular trip to/from Lübeck, Germany was doomed from the start and that things just weren’t going to be going right.

It all started last Thursday (29/04/04) when we took off from STN heading to LBC on a brand-new FR B737-800 in the new livery and with the leather seats, no headrests and the really awful new bright-yellow interior. The take off didn’t seem particularly normal, with lots of swaying from side to side, but nonetheless, we did take off. After about 10-15 minutes, when the cabin crew would normally start their trolley service, nothing happened. I didn’t take too much notice and fell asleep. After about another 15-20 minutes asleep, I woke up only to see that we were still in the clouds. I asked Stewart if anything had been announced. He said nothing had been. Still no trolley service. I didn’t voice my concerns to anyone else, but my mind started racing. I just felt that something was wrong and that this flight wasn’t going to plan.

Sure enough, about 5 minutes later, on comes the Captain to announce that due to a technical failure alert, we wouldn’t be able to continue to Lübeck and that we were Stansted-bound again. No-one spoke loudly on board and all were fairly quiet, but no panic seemed to be arising. My mind was still racing, and Stewart reminded me of the unusual take off, which by then I had forgotten about. Anyway the next 15 or so minutes, we waited to find out what was to happen, if anything. When we came out of the clouds, we didn’t have too far to go to landing, it seemed. When we got lower and lower, it seemed to us both that we were going way too fast for landing and we looked at each other thinking ‘what the feck is going on?’. I’m not even slightly a nervous flyer normally, but this had me a bit worried. Anyway, we landed very hard at STN, by far the hardest landing I’ve ever experienced and then the brakes were applied and we eventually came to a stop. I had convinced myself that there would be fire engine’s present at the landing but I was relieved to see there were in fact none! We parked back at the terminal and we disembarked. When I was getting off the aircraft, there was an engineer standing at the front talking to one of the cabin crew and he had a green power unit/motor-looking-thing in his hand – perhaps about 8-12 inches long and about 6 inches tall and I heard him say to the cabin crew member that it goes in the tail. Anyone any ideas what this may have been? I’m no engineer, I’m afraid!

Anyway, in the end they were transferring the whole flight to another aircraft and we were going to start the LBC flight again. I’m glad to report that the second attempt went without incident and it was a nice flight.

Now, the smarter people among you may have spotted that we flew to Lübeck and may know that Ryanair had problems with Lübeck later on that same day. Yes, unbeknown to us, 3 judges had ruled that Lübeck Airport was to be closed due to some kind of complication to do with the runway repairs or something. This all happened whilst we were in Germany, but we had taken the train from Lübeck and travelled west to Oldenburg where we were to be staying with my friend. We heard nothing of the closure at all and totally without any idea, we turned up at Lübeck Airport last night for our flight home only to find out that it was now leaving from Hamburg, 60 odd km’s away! We had an hour until check-in closed in HAM. EUR80 and one hour 5 minutes later, we arrived at HAM where they had kindly kept check-in open for us! I couldn’t believe it – we had already had the flight home changed by Ryanair when they moved the departure forward by almost 4 hours and now they had to move it to another airport (admittedly not through any choice of theirs). What angered me is that when you book with Ryanair, they ask you for several different contact details including telephone numbers, but all that had been sent to inform us was an email that wasn’t read – I was already on holiday! I think it would have only been right for them to call those people whose journeys had started but had not yet been completed to make sure that they were aware of these rather decent sized changes. Does anyone agree? The REALLY annoying thing was that to get to Lübeck, we had to change trains in Hamburg and because the flight time had been changed on the return sector, we weren’t going to be able to spend the few hours in Hamburg we had hoped for as we had to get to Lübeck earlier!! As it turned out HAM would have been better for us all round, IF someone had have told us about it!! Still, we got back on time in the end, thankfully!

Here’s another laugh for you. When we booked a daytrip with FR to LBC last May, we found out the day before that our return sector time had been brought forward by about 6 hours too and as a result, we had to cancel the trip altogether as the daytrip would have been about 3 hours long!! Alas, the daytrip to LBC in January that we did eventually get to go on went smoothly, so we have at least seen it once stress-free. :rolleyes:

If anyone plans to book LBC flights with FR – I hope you have better luck than we’ve had on this route!! 😀