It has been an awful long time in the making, but finally took to the skies today, carrying passengers on its new Airbus A350 Allegris cabin. The airline operated a charter flight with a mix of employees who had won a raffle to be onboard and press. Simple Flying was one of the first to sample the new cabin, and here’s how we found it.
I was only traveling with hand baggage, so having arrived at the airport, I headed straight to the airport. Clearing security at was a nightmare. Traveling in business class, I joined the business class queue, which quoted a wait time of 3-6 minutes.
The process took around 30 minutes, and the queue moved incredibly slowly. I discovered that the economy queue and business queue were merging. I assume the idea is that the business queue stays free, and passengers get to effectively jump to the standard queue, joining at the end.
In reality, it just caused everything to back right up. When I finally got to the front of the queue the check itself was quick and painless. This was the only poor part of the experience and was irrelevant to the Allegris experience itself.
As this was a special flight, everybody got to the gate quite early. The gate signs noted that this was the first passenger flight of the Allegris cabin. Boarding was done by group, as is traditional on Lufthansa flights.
As I was in business class, I was allocated Group 2, and given there was no first class on the aircraft and the nature of this special flight, boarding started wi.
