Business Seat airberlin - Not Ideal
 

Last Thursday night's flight from Miami back to Düsseldorf was severely turbulent for a lengthy part of the flight. With the jet stream across the Atlantic this is not exactly something new, but it certainly made for an uncomfortable flight with wine glasses (I got a soaking!) and plates flying. Needless to say sleep was impossible.

The other reason was the sheer discomfort of the airberlin business seat, which is very narrow and not long enough. I was in the small cocoon of 1E and the only way to attempt to sleep is to roll onto your side. Because of the narrowness of the seat, lying on my back my arms quickly get sore due to the fact they are leaning on the hard metal edges of the seat armrests. The lack of adequate length is a major pain.

But the biggest upset was that I lost my new glasses and mobile phone, largely due to the turbulence which is nobody's fault. They must have slid down the side of the business seat. Despite clawing around down the sides and under the seat (you can only reach so far), scrabbling amongst bits of fabric, metal parts, paper wrappings and lost biscuits, my glasses and phone seemed to have vanished forever. Not even a thorough search once on the ground at Dusseldorf could reveal them, and the purser promised a 'Techniker' would investigate and return my things to me if found.

So watch out if you are in airberlin business, because the seat has many open spaces where objects can disappear without trace. I seem to remember Lufthansa's seats are more sealed, with less holes down which things can be lost. This was an unexpected and expensive flight for me, especially as the glasses were new. I don't expect that they will be recuperated.

This (glasses disappearing between the seat and the sidewall, unretrievable) happened to me once as well.
As I depend on these glasses to properly see, I hung around the gate until the "Techniker" brought them to me after an hour-and-a-half wait. He told me he had to remove and partially disassemble the seat in order to pull them out of their hiding place.

With this situation airberlin have been utterly, utterly useless and totally unhelpful. My glasses will have made it into a street market weeks ago in the Dominican Republic, if they're not just flying around the world on the same plane. I keep getting sent in circles, to wrong departments, to non functioning telephone numbers.

I should have done a complete Schauspiel on the plane, not got my spare glasses out and simply just stood there until they called a Techniker out to open that stupid business class seat and retrieve my glasses.

Do you still remeber the regristation of the A330?
If yes, I would send an eMail to airberlin Technik and kindly ask them to check the seat.

That's an excellent suggestion and I had thought of it, but in my "morning after" stupor I neglected to note the registration of the plane. But surely it would somehow be possible to find out what plane operated the MIA-DUS AB7001 flight on 9th February?

I paid with the Payback AMEX card, but having called them there is no Versicherung despite having used that card to purchase the glasses. In the UK you are pretty well protected in such cases if you use a credit card to purchases items such as new spectacles.

Very likely it was D-ALPC.