Flying from London Heathrow to Berlin Tegel with British Airways

The tray table that sits between seats in Club Europe. Photo / Winston Aldworth

Winston Aldworth flies aboard BA986, London Heathrow to Berlin Tegel.

The plane: A whizzy little A320-200. British Airways has 70 of these babies, mainly working the European short-haul gigs.

Class: Club Europe, their version of Business.

Seat: I'm in 7D, an aisle seat, while my wife has 7F, her preferred window spot. Between us, in what might otherwise be seat 7E, is a weird little serving platter. We use it to hold our food and drinks. It's a clever move from BA, making it easy for them to convert the 142-seater plane into different configurations of Economy and Business. The downside for regular Business fliers is that there's no difference in the pitch and width.

Price: Our one-way seats cost $483 apiece. Not cheap, but — weirdly — it was going to cost the same to fly in Economy.

How full: Less than half of the 48 seats in Club Europe were full. Pretty much chocker back in Economy (sorry, Euro Traveller) ... hence that weird price thing.

Fellow passengers: A solid Euro mix all the way through.

Time: Scheduled for a 3.35pm departure, we were 25 minutes late taking off. But we made it up in the air, thanks presumably to a tailwind and the utterly predictable tendency of airlines to publicly underestimate how long a flight will take, allowing themselves leeway to make it up, thus pimping their reliability stats.

Service: Lovely job from the BA cabin crew.

Food: Scotch egg! Club sandwiches! So British! The drinks trolley rolls through a couple of times and the staff are admirably determined about getting gin
into me.

The verdict: This was a fine service from a reputable heritage carrier. I don't often get to fly on British Airwaysand I look forward to trying them longhaul.