There’s an old adage known as Hanlon’s razor that suggests that one never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. As the aviation industry starts back up after the COVID-19 shutdown, with staffing a problem at all levels of the industry, it seems that we need a new razor: should poor passenger experience, delays and inefficiency be attributed to the effects of restarting after the shutdown, including the ongoing staffing crunch; is it an unfortunate coincidence; or some combination of chance and continuing pre-pandemic lack of effort?
I asked that question a lot on a pair of recent flights from my home airport of Lyon to Munich with Lufthansa and back again, on board the airline’s Lufthansa CityLine subsidiary’s Canadair-Bombardier-Mitsubishi CRJ-900s. Given Munich’s design and efficiency, especially at Lufthansa’s co-owned Terminal 2 it has been one of my preferred European connection airports for more than a decade. The PaxEx tradeoff of the more efficient airport: the tiny-cabined, minuscule-binned CRJs that are based there for relatively low-demand destinations like Lyon.
On the Lyon-Munich leg, checkin was queueless and swift. This not being my first CRJ rodeo, I mentioned to the checkin agent that I was intending to stand-valet my hard-sided cabin bag — anything larger than a messenger bag doesn’t fit in the overhead bins, and must be handed over at the aircraft to be loaded into the aircraft’s hold, and collected then at the aircraft on arrival — and she filled out the stand-valet tag for me.
It unfortunately seemed that I was the only person who had done so, because boarding took forever: almost every passenger had to fill out the tag at the boarding gate, then pull out anything with a battery in it to hand-carry onboard the aircraft. I fault both Lufthansa (for still not sending an email or popping up a notification for CRJ flights) and Aviapartner (for not doing anything about it at checkin). These are not new planes and this is not a new issue.
Lufthansa’s app is otherwise relatively helpful: it pops up a reassuring baggage receipt notification and the checkin process is clunky but serviceable, although the gate notification wasn’t reliable — not least because it relies on ground handlers to actually update systems.
The seats offered precisely zero upgraded amenities like connectivity, entertainment or at-seat power. My hope is that that means these aircraft will disappear soon, in favour of options like Air Dolomiti’s Embraers or the A319s that CityLine also operates. Lufthansa did hand out a very reassuring and quite alcoholically pungent sanitising wipe. And the German mask mandate was in full force.
The seats onboard are the CRJ standard. Image: John Walton
The meal on both flights was miserly, and regrettably identical, though at no point did I discover what the two little slices of mystery meat consisted of.
The meal on the return flight was entirely identical. Image: John Walton
I presume the meat was some kind of corned beef, with a tiny scoop of bean salad on a single lettuce leaf, with a small quenelle of unidentifiably flavoured mousse for dessert. Lufthansa should let business passengers have their pick of what they fancy from the buy-on-board menu.
Perhaps Lufthansa should just give up catering these flights for business and move to free choice from the onboard menu. Image: John Walton
Arriving at Munich, there was an interminable wait for the ground handlers to get to us out on the remote stands beyond the satellite terminal, then a long bus ride into the main terminal, and then a long wait for luggage.
This didn’t feel like the Munich Airport operation that one used to be able to count on, with its forty-minute minimum connection time. (A fifteen-minute wait to drop my bag at the business class counter on my onward flight the next day wasn’t exactly reassuring either.)
Alas, there has been no improvement on Munich’s bus gating procedure, which really lets the airport down: it’s a full four flights of stairs down from the boarding gate, with no elevator or escalator. For an airport that still relies heavily on remote gates, this is poor, and it was inexcusable that there was no accessible solution offered to an elderly fellow passenger whose luggage I carried down while her son supported her down the four flights of stairs to the waiting bus.
On return to Lyon, too, we were held inside the aircraft while a lone ground handler staff member pulled every single piece of stand-valet luggage off the plane without much spirit of alacrity.
This isn’t all Lufthansa’s fault specifically: much of it was down to ground handling outside their direct control. But like any passenger, the entire experience does get summed up under the heading of “this wasn’t a great Lufthansa trip”, soured by the needless and avoidable delays. Ten minutes here, ten minutes there, and your forty-minute connection looks quite dodgy.
The little Lufthansa-branded chocolate at the end of the meal was actually delicious. Image: John Walton
Lufthansa provided the flights discussed in this review, but as ever all opinions are those of the author alone.
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Featured image credited to John Walton
