Review: A delayed evening flight from Dublin to London with Aer Lingus

Aer Lingus has one aircraft painted up in their 1960s livery, which happened to be the plane taking me to London. The delayed evening flight turned out to be pretty standard, with nothing special on board to link to the outside paint.

I arrived at Dublin Airport Terminal 2 around 5:35pm for my 7:00pm flight. There are staff shortages in Dublin at the moment and the electronic sign informed me it would be 40 minutes to get through security. Turns out it took 30 minutes, so not too bad I suppose.

Aer Lingus Lounge

Once through, I noticed the flight was delayed by half an hour so I headed down to the Aer Lingus lounge. As I was travelling to London, I could gain access using my British Airways Gold Executive Club card. You can find a full review of the lounge here.

The only food on the counter on this visit appeared to be cake slice desserts, but I did see people with other food. Turns out what must have been the leftovers from earlier in the day were all a fridge. That plus some hot soup went down very well.

Boarding The Delayed Evening Flight

I headed down to the gate and noticed that boarding had yet to start, so I went for a wander. The terminal is quite quiet later in the day as all the transatlantic flights are long gone.

Eventually boarding commenced and everyone was advised that wearing face masks on Aer Lingus flights is still mandatory. I think that’s ridiculous in this instance as both Ireland and the UK have dropped the mask mandate completely.

EI182 – Dublin to London Heathrow (DUB-LHR)
13 May 2022
Airbus A320 – EI-DVM – St. Colman
Seat: Economy 3A
Departure: 19:00 Arrival: 20:20

While in the boarding line I was pleased to see the person asking people to put their masks on. At least nobody was going to get away without wearing one.

Flying to London

Once on board, I sat down in my usual seat, 3A. When boarding was completed (after the revised 7:30pm departure time), the barrage of announcements commenced. Aer Lingus really do go on and on and on all the time with the innumerable PAs. First up was something about not taking pictures of the crew or their procedures.

During the safety demonstration, the toddler in front of me screamed at the top of his lungs, much to everyone’s annoyance. He then wouldn’t put his seat belt on and his beleaguered mother, with encouragement from two cabin crew, had to get him to put it on so we could go.

Happily he got it on and off we went into the sky. Naturally then we got more announcements about the cabin service, and the crew then passed through selling things from the Bia menu.

I sat around listening to music for the flight as I’d already eaten. Another announcement for people to clear up, then another one close to landing to check your seatbelts again, plus the pilot was on at one point too… it felt like the PAs would never end.

Overall Thoughts

Thanks to the 50 minute flight time, the delayed evening service managed to claw back some time. They got us off stand in Dublin with peak efficiency, so we made up time at every opportunity, which is good.

Aer Lingus offer a pleasant experience across the Irish Sea to the UK. I find it simple and straightforward, and in this case the fare was also decent enough at €59.39 for the flight and €16.99 for the seat, for a total of €76.38.

What do you think of Aer Lingus? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image by Rob Hodgkins via Wikimedia Commons.