Greetings from sunny(but then rather rainy) Durban.
Key facts
- New direct LHR-DUR service started on Monday 29 October 2018
- The service runs 3 days a weeks from London Heathrow Terminal 5 on Mondays, Thursday and Saturday.
- Flights leave London late afternoon as an overnight flight, arriving early in the morning in to Durban King Shaka International Airport
- From Durban to LHR the service runs as a long daytime flight on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays mornings.
- On other days of the week there remains the indirect flights via JNB and possibly CPT, with connections provided by BA-Comair.
- It's a relatively long flight, 11 hours and covers 5,900 miles
- The service is operated by 787-8 aircraft, which have Club World, World Traveller Plus and World Traveller cabins, there is no First cabin sold on this route.
- Flights are currently operated by Mixed Fleet crew
- Currently the cheapest return fares from London are £488 in World Traveller, as a Basic (HBO) fare.
BA links
https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb...ghts-to-durban
Ten things to do in Durban and KwaZulu-Natal
https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb...-kwazulu-natal
The inaugural service
We start with a photo of the arrival of G-ZBJH on 30 October 2018 at dawn in Durban, having left London Heathrow Terminal 5 at 15:24 the previous day. So that's a flight of 11 hours and 4 minutes, take off (16:08 GMT) to landing (05:12 local time) to cover the Great Circle mileage of 5,903 miles, or 9,500 km. As you can see there was quite an arrival party. There wasn't a water salute, given that South Africa is recovering from a drought, plus BA don't allow water salutes on B787s, fearful that the water pressure from the fire brigade hoses would damage the aircraft.
It's not the first time that the scale of festivities for an inaugural has been kept low key at the London end. If you look carefully you will see some mention of the special day on the screens.
Whereas at the Durban end we got a band to serenade our arrival: There was quite a crowd of people there for this, and several television crews.
There was also a trolley of wine, juice and doughnuts, though I doubt many of the passengers would have been hungry at this point.
But to rewind a bit, just before departure from London on Monday afternoon, we rolled past the 747 that has been marked up for the 2018 Poppy Appeal.
After departure there was a bit of slow trundle to departures, but soon enough we were on our way southwards. The flight was fairly smooth, I think the seat belt lights came on just once mid flight for turbulence, and not at all for the return flight.
Here was the main meal menu, which is in line with the new CW catering standard.
The wine and other drinks were the same on the return flight, and details are in the second post in this thread below.
The service involved two rounds of drinks first and a fairly leisurely roll into the meal service. Given the long flight and we were airborne just after 4pm I could see the point in not rushing out food too soon after lunch. See timings below but the starters arrived 97 minutes after take off at 17:45 hrs GMT, which seemed OK to me. All meals were prepared fully in the galley and brought to passengers, there was no trolley run at all in Club World in either direction at any point.
For the starters I went for the soup and salad, which tends to work well on the new CW menu. As it did here, though a bit of extra seasoning in the soup lifted it somewhat.
Then for the main course I went for the vegetable curry, and it was pretty stunning - creamy and flavoursome with a bit of a kick without being anti-social about it. I would definitely have this again given the chance.
I am glad I asked for both the dessert and the cheese, since the Afrikaner dish, Melktert (milk tart) was distinctly ungenerous. One gulp and it was gone! Luckily the cheese board was a shade more lavish.
And so to bed. Breakfast was served 75 minutes before arrival. The menu was almost identical to the breakfast served to me in First a few weeks before on LHR-KUL, certainly in terms of the hot options. I didn't get that far, it was a bit early for me to tackle the lower section of the menu.
Most unfortunately, from my perspective, the crew could not get the Moving Map to work in either direction. The crew tried to kid the system by entering that we were flying to or from JNB, but nothing seemed to work. It did feel odd not to have the Map available, not least because the route through Africa was to my mind very interesting. Highly annoying.
Note about the crew
This is the first longhaul service I can recall where the inaugural was handled by Mixed Fleet, BA management tends to prefer Worldwide crews to at least start the service, and perhaps handing over to MF a few months down the line. I was very pleased with the service I had on this flight, and indeed the return too since it was the same crew. The CSM had a background on Virgin and was excellent, her IBM (line manager) was also working the flight - that's the norm on inaugurals - and she was supported by a clearly hand-picked crew. I was mainly served by the CSM and referred to by my surname by all crew throughout both flights. There weren't that many status passengers on board, strangely. Outbound was nearly a full flight in all cabins, inbound was only half full. The outbound was characterised by a high proportion of fairly elderly passengers, which can sometimes add to the pressures on crew given that few of them seemed to be seasoned travellers. But the mainly young crew seemed to enjoy looking after them, despite the extra work involved. I would see their efforts were appreciated by these passengers.
Flight timings
All times GMT.
15:24 - Doors closed
15:27 - Airbridge disengaged
15:41 - Pushback from stand B48
15:56 - Arrival at 09R queue point
16:08 - Take off from 09R
16:15 - Seat belt sign off
16:45 - Drinks
16:55 - Meal order
17:15 - Second round of drinks
17:45 - First course served
18:15 - Main course
18:40 - Dessert / cheese
18:55 - Tray removed
01:55 - Breakfast served (orders were taken immediately before service, there were no cards)
03:13 - Landing in DUR
03:23 - Doors open, gate 20. This was 05:23 South African time.
Scheduled times were depart 15:30 GMT, arrive 05:20 South African time.
Arrival comments
From doors open to the taxi pickup area didn't take long, in sharp contrast to some experiences at CPT and JNB, probably not more than 15 minutes in all from leaving the aircraft. I waked straight to an immigration officer with no queue, and they seemed to have about 6 agents out for the BA service, which was the only international flight arriving that morning. Before that, there was a slightly odd experience since the Customs service wanted to run their sniffer dogs through the hand luggage. The procedure in the UK is to allow the dogs (often Springers) to run past the passenger and they are picking up a bit on the passenger's reactions to some degree. However in Durban we were herded into blocks of about a dozen and asked to leave our bags on one side of the corridor, and stand clear on the other side, well away from the dog working his way through the line of bags (a Lab cross from the looks of him, which also made me wonder about effectiveness). I suppose it only took a few minutes in all but the Customs officers made it a bigger deal than the UK version.
I used Uber from the airport. This required several attempts, because the taxi drivers aren't yet used to services arriving at this hour. The collection area is Arrival Pickup, which is the exit door just past the airport branch of Woolworths. Moreover the App doesn't show the taxi moving towards you, due to a local block on GPS tracking. So you're best to send an in-App message to the driver after ordering saying something like "standing on the left side of the pickup area", and seeing if it gets auto-acknowledged as delivered. And/or ring the driver. This is likely to be a temporary issue, the airport run is a sought after fare by drivers so over time there will be better supply. 280 ZAR to the Hilton Durban. Otherwise Uber works well in Durban and uMhlanga.
Route map
History of the route
With a grateful thanks to
DrBernardo who has once again done a great job in giving some background to the route. The rest of this section comes from him.
Durban was first served by air from the UK on Imperial Airways Flying Boat services, which began in June 1937, on the following route: Southampton – Marseille – Rome – Brindisi – Athens – Alexandria – Cairo – Luxor – Wadi Halfa – Khartoum – Malakal – Butiaba – Port Bell (Kampala) – Kisumu – Mombasa – Dar es Salaam – Lindi – Lumbo – Quelimane – Beira – Lourenco Marques – Durban (plus some optional stops along the way!). There is a nice description of the journey from a traveller’s diary on this webpage (
http://www.fad.co.za/Resources/aviation/FB/eye5.htm).
With the start of the Second World War, commercial flying ceased and Imperial Airways was merged into BOAC, which took over the flying boat services for official purposes and – realising that routes across the Mediterranean might become blocked – established a base for their flying boats at Durban. In 1940, when services from the UK via the Med indeed had to end, Durban became one end of the so-called “horseshoe route” for flying boats, which saw them flying up to Cairo, then East to Singapore, and down to Sydney and Auckland and back – to connect the “rest” of the Empire now that all their previous routes (many of which connected in Cairo/Alexandria in any case) originating from the UK were blocked. Once BOAC acquired flying boats with a long enough range, during the war, they were once again able to link into this route from the UK with a flight that went via Lisbon down to and around West Africa, and then East across Central Africa to Khartoum.
After the end of the war, commercial services resumed on the earlier routes, but the growing ability of longer-range land-based aircraft to fly routes and lack of commercial demand meant the flying boat service to Durban ended in March 1947 (although military services continued for around 10 years thereafter). The new services operated to the more major cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg, however.
British Airways (as BOAC had by then become) next ventured to Durban in January 1981, as a weekly beyond point on one of the two weekly Heathrow – Harare services (the other one going on to Cape Town). By 1988 this weekly service had moved behind Jo’burg instead (possibly with a short break from ’87 – ’88, though it’s hard to find evidence of this – if anyone has a Worldwide Timetable for Summer 1987, I’d be interested to check). Services to South Africa were a rather fraught matter during the 1990s, owing both to the South African government’s extreme reluctance to allow more services (despite a burgeoning tourism industry and a lack of capacity – protecting SAA seemed to take priority) as well as a long wrangle between BA and Virgin for rights for new flights.
In any case, the gradual increase in services, and relative strength of the Durban market (compared to Joburg) in the first half of the decade, saw the number of frequencies to Durban (still behind JNB) increase to 4 per week. A combination of the increasing focus on the JNB market, the new franchise arrangement with South African carrier Comair, and the expense of operating short end-sectors beyond Joburg, finally led to them being dropped in March 1999. At the time, the number of air services to South Africa allowed by the government was “maxed out” by BA and Virgin, so there was no question of a direct London-Durban service, even if there had been enough traffic to justify it as a standalone.
Route promotion
There is some advertising in Durban for the new route, and a number of people I met there were aware that the service had started.
There are also some good deals on BA Holidays to Durban, feature hotels and fly-drive options. There is also a promotion, valid until approximately 12 December, on some Amex cards, allowing £100 off the direct fares to Durban:
Gaming the Amex Durban offer
Launch background
And the background to this new service can be found here
Would Durban be viable? [starts 29th Oct 2018, 3 x weekly, 787-8]