After spending Memorial Day in Boston, the next phase of our journey continues with this trip across the Atlantic to Ireland.
Irish flag carrier Aer Lingus has had a presence in Boston for decades, owing to the city’s large Irish-American population, as well as being the Northeast’s secondary educational and commercial nexus for young Irishmen and Irishwomen seeking education or employment abroad. As a consequence, Logan International Airport has gotten just about every widebody type Aer Lingus has ever flown, in addition to the new A321LR, which has allowed the airline to increase daily services on its more well-traveled routes as well as allowing it to begin new ones like DUB-BDL and DUB-BNA. However, services to cuties like Boston are still anchored on the A330 family, which goes to BOS once daily. Haven’t done a flight on Aer Lingus yet, surprisingly enough, and I figured that it was high time I did a European trip report series with something outside the tetrarchy of Air France, British Airways, KLM, and Lufthansa.
Server: Solo
Airline: Aer Lingus
Aircraft: Airbus A330-200
Origin: General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport, Boston, Massachusetts (BOS)
Destination: Dublin Airport, Collinstown, Ireland (DUB)
Flight Number: EI132
Route: KBOS-EIDW
Seat: 5A (Business)
Time En Route: 7 Hours 15 Minutes
Waiting to board at Gate C17. Unlike most international flights to and from Boston, which operate out of Terminal E, Aer Lingus uses the C Gates due to its codes hare with JetBlue. Our aircraft for this evening is a 19.1 year-old A330-200 registered EI-DUO and named “St Columba/Colum” after the sixth-century Irish abbot.
Depending on traffic volume and which way the pattern is oriented, taxi times at Logan can be upwards of 25 minutes if one’s flight is departing from Runway 33L. This evening, however, we were lucky enough to get a break in the departures and so had a taxi time of only around 15 minutes. Aer Lingus’s three A330-200s each have their own unique seating configurations, with EI-DUO having 273 seats in a 23C/250M setup. We’re in one of the 23 business class seats, with the cabin arranged in alternating rows of 1-2-2 and 1-2-1. Seated in the rearmost 1-2-1 tow, we have a fairly private, very comfortable seat for the flight ahead.
Blasting airborne from Boston in the evening. Once again, we’re in a prime spot to listen to the CF6s at takeoff thrust. Below us, another Aer Lingus A330, an A330-300 this time, is pulling into the gate we left not long ago.
Turning north along the coast of Massachusetts as we climb to our initial cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Seeing the ocean glow a golden-green-blue as the Sun sets is breathtaking. We’re browsing the menu for what we’ll have for dinner, which’ll be served once we level off.
Dinner is served somewhere over the middle of Maine. We’re having the seared grass-fed beef fillet with celeriac guyère gratin and sage purée. Looks like it’ll be very tasty, if the food is as good as the presentation.
After a brief nap, we’re waking up over the Western edge of Greenland at FL370. At this time of the year, the Sun never really sets at this latitude, with there always being at least some amount of light. It’s always quite surreal to see the sunlight on the horizon at around 3 in the morning, or even higher in the sky the further north one goes.
Descending over the Irish countryside. From the air, we can see that Ireland is called the Emerald Isle for a reason. Almost everything in sight is an extremely vivid shade of green.
Arriving in Dublin on Runway 28 just in time for breakfast. The flight crew aerobraked us for a few seconds before putting the nose gear down and opening the thrust reversers. We actually landed a few minutes early, so it remains to be seen if we’ll have to wait for a gate or not.
Taxiing by DUB’s cargo ramp with a pair of DHL A300-600RFs operated by ASL Airlines Ireland and a FedEx 767-300F on the ramp, with Dublin’s ATC tower in the background. Apparently, it’s looking like we won’t have to wait for our gate, after all. The aircraft previously occupying it was able to get an early pushback, which is fortuitous for us, as we can get something to eat sooner.
Viewing our aircraft get prepared for its next flight before heading to customs. For an airline we had no prior experience on, we were somewhat apprehensive of what we’d be getting on Aer Lingus in business class. However, after this flight, we can strongly say that our concerns were unfounded. The food was great, the cabin service was polite and friendly, and while we didn’t sleep much on this long medium-haul flight, what sleep we got was very restful; in short, business class on Aer Lingus gave us everything we’d expect from business class on any highly-regarded carrier. Truly a grand flight and there’ll definitely be more to come with EI!
