Round The World and other travels

Prior to boarding, I'd noticed that my A321 bore the notable registration D-AIRY and, now that I was on board, I also saw that it was named after the city of Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, one of the first German cities that I visited. I settled into my natural home, 1A.   There were five rows in Business Class and the cabin was fairly busy, but at the same time everybody seemed to be well spaced out (so to speak!) Happily, both 1C and 2A were unoccupied. Boarding was complete by 1230 - isn't it funny the way that Lufty crew always announce this! - but we didn't push back from stand for a further nine minutes. A long taxi out to 25L meant a further 12 minutes passed before we took to the skies.

We climbed to our cruising altitude of 34,000ft and took up our route via Marseille, Geneva and Zurich. The Captain reported the temperature in Frankfurt as a freezing -8C. No wonder the Purser had asked if I was connecting to another flight when I'd handed her my jacket earlier!

Soon, the meal trays were being handed out. An accompanying leaflet advised that in 2009, short-haul Business Class flights would feature meals drawn from the various regions of Germany. Today's leaflet, bearing the familiar image of Dresden's Frauenkirche, indicated that we were being treated to 'Flavours of Saxony'. The main dish consisted of crayfish tails with cold vegetables, which was actually very much nicer than it sounds! I washed it down with a glass of Riesling. There was also a little dessert and a seasonal white chocolate snowman with nutty filling, all nicely rounded off with a coffee.

We started our descent at 1425 and were on the ground within ten minutes. We braked really hard - they must have wanted us off the runway for the plane behind - and then had to wait as our path to the gate was blocked by another aircraft. Despite this, we managed an ahead-of-schedule arrival at 1445.

An enjoyable short flight!