Smirnoff

That seems quite common these days. I am going out on AY on Wed, but back on the late one, the 875 on Thurs. Currently have 3F assigned, but club goes back to row 16 at the moment. Half the seats from 1-6 are free (I these are the Gold rows), 7-12 is full-ish, 13-16 is empty.

ericaswas

these are, ahem airmiles, redemptions (don't worry, I have seen the light and am switching to BA miles after this trip!) so I am limited to what they have. The BA direct flight is appealing but expensive (in miles). There are other cheaper airlines, including KLM from Cardiff where I live, but what puts me off about a non-direct flight is the connection and what happens if it's missed. When you're only going for 2 nights and you're acting as travel courier for your entire family, getting there a day late is a disaster! I looked at Swiss because they have more than 1 flight to DME per day, so if we missed the connection and weren't able to reach DME at 1745, there would still be the possibility of the later flight arriving at 2am - although House said they are more likely to hold the connection than put you on the next one.

LH were more expensive in miles last time I looked. Also taxes seem to be greater with non-direct flights (in Airmiles-land?).

I take your point about Soviet-style hotels but I have done my homework and found some good info here:

http://www.visitmoscow.com/

There are plenty of non-recommended hotels on this site, but the Sovietsky isn't one, and it's cheap!
What's always hard is getting consensus from all the reviews you read!

I will avoid the Novotel, however, following your first-hand reports, W14_26C and simon_n10!

The radisson is Ł200 a night incl tax, bit more than the Swissotel, which was mentioned above. Another way to reduce costs is for 4 of us to share one room, if I could find hotels where this could be comfortably done. But it seems that bigger rooms with more bed space also mean more luxury and higher costs.

Anyone stayed at the Tatiana, Daniloskaya or Akvarel?

Smirnoff

It was nice come back on the late flight (BA875) on a 767 last night after years of miserable cramped flights on the Airbus.

Bad news is, so the BA girls at DME said, it's going back to the A320 in February. They say just for the month of Feb, as it's quiet that month. Let's just hope this wasn't a short-lived enhancement. Or I'll get very angry again.

E14 26C

Well, that settles it Ł589.90 for a fully flex business class via Waw with Lot then it may well be - Company policy is a definite Y only on this route

WHBM

Just to pick up on the weather again ....

Our General Manager in St Petersburg has a nice house out in the country (not his dacha but their main house) on the Vyborg road which has oil-fired central heating. Obviously very necessary currently. He tells me it has broken down for no other reason than the oil in the tank, out in the garden, has frozen

Being Russian of course ingenuity has come to the fore and he has bought barrels of road diesel from a service station and adjusted the pipework in his boiler room so it is fed from this rather than from the tank. I wonder how many non-technical (as he is) Brits could set to such an adaptation and make it work.

norodnik

Yes, well it was very quiet going out on Tuesday from LHR on the 1235.

In fact, BA managed another fowl up when they realised that all the freight they were loading would unbalance the plane (too few passengers at the back!!!). Their solution was...

lets move all the Golds who have the front few rows of eco to the back!!!

So my 23A seat became 35A. As you can imagine, being at the back of the plane just adds another 30 mins or so at DME whilst waiting to get through immigration so I was not pleased to say the least. In addition, rows 21-12 had a grand total of 6 people (CE) but none of them were required to move.

When you have paid Ł800 GBP for an eco return, its nice to know the freight is still worth more!!!

Smirnoff

The seating was also strange last night. MMB had extended CE back to the last bulkhead (row 22?) before the flight.

It turned out that the front cabin was FULL with CE passengers. The middle cabin was virtally empty. And the 3rd cabin must have been full with Y passengers.

Smirnoff

Don't forget AY in fully flexible business (if bought in Moscow) is Ł800. Also allows you to use BA codeshare on LHR-HEL. And you get double the tier points for taking 2 flights instead of 1, to get to Moscow.

lewinr

I wonder if you've ever seen this hotel. It is actually a very histroical building that is quite nice on the inside.

The only bad things about the hotel are that it really is soviet (a bit old and run down, although they are making an effort to make it nicer) and it is not in the center (although it is also not too far out- between Belorusskaya and Dinamo).

Its main restaurant, Yar, is one of the places on my "must visit" list for guests who come to Russia.
Have a look here: http://www.sovietsky.ru/

Disclaimer: I'm a bit biased because I had my wedding there...

norodnik

Not having much luck these days..

Last nights 873 was a right old comedy performance..

Inbound 40 mins late, but crew made a good turnaround and we pushed back for de-ice only 15 mins late.

Then the fun...

After de-ice the engines refused to start

waited for rig to arrive to start engines manually (small groans at the delay)

Rig arrives but after de-ice limit has expired. We wait for de-ice rig to turn up again (bigger groans)

De-iced again, then find that external rig doesn't start the engines either!!!!

Big groans as captain calls for engineers who then goes to work on the "stuck valve"

At this time, everyone was on their mobiles trying to get on the later flight or some other alternative. We watch the later BA flight arrive and know we will not get on it as capt has elected not to go back to the gate.

Finally, engineer receives clearance from immigartion to open the electronics bay (apparently he can't open any part of the aircraft away from the gate without their say so!!!! mad!!)

Engineer flips switches and engine starts (hooray!!!)

Everyone on mobiles busy cancelling all the held reservations

De-ice crew arrive and agree to de-ice the aircraft with one egine running (good for them, wouldn't happen at LHR)

I am worries at this point that we have to leave in 20 mins or the crew will run out of hours (given 3.5 hour flight time)

Plane de-iced and ready to go, other engine starts!!!

THEN.....

A passenger in club informs capt that they do not feel well enough to fly

Captain comes on board and says, we are all ready but this pax doesn't feel well and we have to go back to the terminal to drop him off, and therefore the flight is cancelled as crew will be out of hours, engines probably wont start again etc etc

Huge uproar, everyone wants to know who the pax is so we can throw him off. After 2.5 hours stuck in plane at DME on a Friday night, no one in mood for this.

Apparently angry mob and capt manage to "persuade" the pax that he is not really ill at all

Captain then announces pax recovered, but the crew is out of hours (more boos)

However, Capatin says there has been a discussion amongst the crew and they have elected to operate anyway

Huge applause!!!

Off we go, flight passes with lots of drinks.....

Of course, when we finally arrive at LHR, we are given a remote stand, buses take ages and normal 10 min queue at immigration

The joys of getting home on a Friday night!!!

Smirnoff

The flights to/from DME are the ones I really do NOT enjoy.

Bad crew, bad passengers, bad delays, bad food. Just bad.

Smirnoff

I can't imagine why any crew would ever want to go out of hours at DME.

Presumably the crew, not having visa, would be escorted out the airport by immigration and locked in a cockroach-infested transit hotel for the night. Unless they stood to earn a fortune in overtime.

This happened to me once at SVO, the 873 went tech, and we all got turfed off the plane. Total chaos as 250 passengers had to get back through one passport control desk, where a 16yo conscript had to find each person's immigration form, and return it to them, and put a stamp on it.

I was about 50thin the queue and it took 2 hours to get back landside. You wouldn't want to have to re-clear immigration, trust me.

Woking_Mike

Ah Norodnik, you were on the same flight as me.

The "ill" passenger was a Russian in 7B (or is it C?). Him and his wife had been increasingly adgitated as the delay went on, and at one point were trying to lead a revolt against the crew because they did not trust the plane any more! Unfortunately they picked on a load of English businessmen (myself included) whose response was "shut up, I just want to get home!"

One thing that did occur during the delay was that they discovered that the "final" attempt at starting the engines was a one time only trick and even if it worked, should the engine be shut down again there was no way of re-startig it.

So then they pulled the "too ill to travel" trick. And at that point I seriously did fear for their health becasue everyone in the forward cabin knew who it was and what they were doing and were quite prepared to lynch them.

Then the CSD turned up with a form (or more like a booklet) that the gentleman had to fill in to fully declare his illness. He promplty threw this back into the face of the CSD!

It was a good point because the crew finally lost all patience with the man, but a bad point because we must of been within 30 seconds of the crew calling the police and offloading them.

Finally faced withe the option of a) filling out 30 pages in triplicate about his non-existent illness and b) the wrath of everyone on the plane he sat down and said "lets just fly!"

Never been so relieved to take off in my life!

norodnik

Woking_Mike,

being in Y (Row 25) we were spared the drama of knowing what was going on at the front. However, we knew it was somewhere up the front and some of the pax were preparing to march up there to find out who the culprit was. The crew were almost encouraging us but I think only to lighten the atmosphere a bit.

Hopefully won't have to go through that again. Thought the crew and captain did a good job (apart from the poor landing in LHR!!!) but , like you, was more than glad when we took off as the alternatives were (sure to be) much worse.

Moscowflyer

We must have had the same temperamental 767 plane on the Sunday 873 because this one was comprehensively knackered.

It started well: cold weather, breakfast at the Starlite Diner, skating with my 2 year old on Patriarchy Ponds, 35 minutes to the airport with a pre-printed boarding pass and through security very quickly. Plenty of time to sit in the lounge. Board the plane sit in first row of a fairly full economy. Cabin crew say "it's a bit crowded, you can spread out into the unused 3 rows of the club cabin if you like". Shaping up to be a very pleasant flight with a cheerful crew.

We pushed back bang on time, did all the deicing stuff and then nothing seemed to be happening. I'd read the previous threads so knew that there had been problems on Friday. Sure enough, along comes the captain to announce that there was "a bit of a problem with the engines and the engineers are working on it, it'll be 10 minutes". It was a lot longer than 10 minutes before we heard that we were going to be towed back to the stand so "they could open it up and look inside". Mindful of the problems on Friday I called reservations in the UK and switched to the 875 which was a relatively straightforward process (to BA's credit) and 1 or 2 other people then did the same. Eventually it transpired that even with the engineer standing downstairs with the cranking handle the engine was completely b*$$&%$d and we wouldn't be going anywhere. By now it was about 7.45pm and we were told that we'd all be switched to the later 875 that would wait for us.

An hour later we finally started getting off the plane. It seems that BA and the airport had to take 200 people off the first plane on their computer and then put them on the computer as being on the next plane and this was a slow process. With 10 minutes to go before the 875 officially left we were told again that the plane would indeed wait for us and that baggage would be transferred. That did all happen, but the 8.55pm departure of the 875 ended up being more like 10.30pm and we arrived in Heathrow at 11.30pm (with at least a stand at the main terminal). At least we had no sickies on board though, or they expired quietly with their seatbelts fastened and were only discovered on arrival in London.

The crew seemed to be stuck in Moscow overnight as their plane wasn't going anywhere and I guess they had to wait for a spare part to arrive on the next flight from London. They seemed concerned about whether they'd get anything to eat or where they'd be staying. There are hotels available, although not right next to the airport but passengers from cancelled flights have been put up in them before now without death or disfigurement so I assume the crew managed to get to a hotel (braving immigration without a visa would be interesting, although has certainly been possible at SVO in the past).

I wish BA's planes worked better though. I travel as much on CX as on BA and I've never had a serious technical problem with a CX flight (although they of course happen and I've obviously been lucky in my travels). Still, 13 hours from Moscow house to London house...