After flying in Etihad’s A380 The Residence, I connected onto an Aer Lingus flight from Paris (CDG) to Dublin (DUB). I flew Aer Lingus’ AerSpace product on the A321LR, which might just be the best value premium product in Europe (since you get a flat bed, and it’s only marginally more expensive than economy).
While I’ll of course publish a full review, in this post I’d like to talk a bit about the boarding process of this flight, which was unlike anything I’ve seen before. It wasn’t a big deal at all, I’m just curious if anyone has theories as to what was going on.
My Aer Lingus flight “boarded” 35 minutes early
I had around three hours at Paris Charles de Gaulle between my arrival from Abu Dhabi and my departure to Dublin. I had no lounge access, but I’ve gotta say, Terminal 1 is a really pleasant place to hang out. Doesn’t this look nicer than many lounges?!
Anyway, my Aer Lingus flight was scheduled to board at 9:55AM. As y’all know, I always line up and try to be among the first to board, so that I can get good cabin pictures. I’m also of course a massive airplane nerd, so I was tracking the inbound aircraft on Flightradar24, and thought I had a good sense of everything going on.
Suddenly at 9:20AM, I heard a boarding call for my Aer Lingus flight. I was genuinely confused… did I somehow totally mix this up, and the 9:55AM time was actually the departure time and not the boarding time? So I quickly threw everything in my bag and headed to the gate (and still managed to be the first person in the priority line).
The thing is, there was no plane at the gate, so I found the whole thing strange. I asked the gate agent “is the flight leaving from a remote stand?” She looked at me but didn’t seem to understand my question. “Do we have to take a bus to the plane?” She said no, the plane was leaving from the gate in front of us.
That was confusing, since there wasn’t yet a plane at the gate. So just about the whole plane worth of passengers were queued up at the gate (note that our boarding passes weren’t yet scanned, but we were just lined up). Several minutes later, the plane arrived at the gate.
However, it took around 20 minutes from the time that boarding was announced until boarding actually started. Passengers were invited onboard at around 9:40AM, and boarding wrapped up at 9:50AM, as the flight wasn’t very full.
Then we just sat on the plane for nearly 40 minutes, until the scheduled 10:30AM departure time. What’s funny is that it took roughly the same amount of time from boarding being called until the door closed, as it did to actually fly between Paris and Dublin.
I can’t really make sense of this strange boarding?
Admittedly airlines take different approaches to boarding, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like this before.
For example, I know that Ryanair has a habit of lining people up very early and already scanning boarding passes, and making passengers wait in a “holding pen.” That way the airline already knows if everyone showed up, can verify if cabin baggage is correct, and can very efficiently get everyone onboard when it’s time.
However, in this case, no boarding passes were actually scanned for the 20 minutes between when “boarding” was called, and when boarding actually started. And I’m also not sure I see the benefit of just having everyone sit on a plane for around 40 minutes until departure time, when leaving half an hour early just isn’t realistic, even if all passengers are onboard (the plane still had to be refueled, which took us most of the way to departure time).
So I’m curious… obviously this was super minor, but was this an isolated incident, is it a trend I’ve just missed, or what?
Bottom line
Boarding for my short haul Aer Lingus flight was called a full 35 minutes ahead of schedule, before the plane even arrived at the airport. I’ve never experienced a boarding process like this before, especially since we just had to stand there for around 20 minutes (before having our boarding passes scanned), and then we wrapped up boarding 40 minutes before departure.
In my millions of miles of flying, it was definitely one of the more unusual boarding processes I’ve experienced.
Does anyone have a theory as to what was going on here, or is the norm on Aer Lingus, and I’m just not familiar with it?
