I'm scheduled to fly to Glasgow in a few weeks with Delta, who is partnering with KLM for the AMS to GLA leg. However, I received an email from KLM a few days ago that said the flight will now be operated by KLM's partner German Airways.
I'm assuming since it's a German airline it will be efficient, but just wondered if anyone else has flown with them and what your experience was.
At the very least, it will give me an opportunity to practice my German. 😊
German Airways is a "Wet Lease" airline—they don't sell flights themselves but are called in when an airline needs extra planes. Probably KLM has some maintenance issue that has taken some planes offline, and they needed temporary replacements. The pilots will definitely be from German Airways, cabin crew could depend on the terms of the deal. Unlike a codeshare, all the ground services will be from KLM—check-in, gate agents, etc.
Interestingly, Baltic Air had extra capacity this season and wet-leased some planes to another carrier. Then they had issues getting parts for their own planes, and have had to hire wet-leased planes from someone else.
From what I can see, it looks like when you book a Delta Airlines flight, and in the fine print it says "operated by Mesaba Airlines". I don't know if they will be flying with KLM paint, or with their own livery, but this thing is very common these days where big airlines farm out their feeder flights on smaller aircraft operated by contractors. German Airways uses Embaer 190's.
Okay, thanks to both of you!
Scudder, good to know that about the ground services - that will make things easier I think.
Sam, the Embraer 190 looks to be a decent size plane - thanks!
There's a good chance the original flight was on 'KLM Cityhopper', which is more like the Delta/Mesaba example—except Mesaba was independent and Cityhopper is a wholly owned subsidiary. If the original plan was on CityHopper it, too, would have been on an E-190.
That could be - I went back and checked my original emails from Delta but they just have the flight number.
I did realize that I misspoke in my post - it's not the AMS to GLA leg on my flight over, but the GLA to AMS flight on the return trip. Not that it makes much difference. :)
whichever it is you'll just barely get up to altitude before you've on the way back down. Teeny tiny flight.
Enjoy!!
Thanks, Nigel! Hopefully it won’t be like my short hop last year from CDG to BER when we had to turn back after we had flown more than halfway there, then had to wait another several hours before they found another plane to get us there. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except they lost a group of passengers (the group I was with) and we were wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. But hey, that was Air France and this is not. 😊
that doesn't sound like any fun at all. How do you lose a whole group?
"in a Handbag?"
"To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." A whole group?
🤣🤣🤣 Nigel, you couldn’t have picked a more perfect quote. That is one of my favorite plays ever! And Lady Bracknell is probably one of my favorite characters.
And an answer to your question, they sent us to an office that was not staffed, and when we got tired of waiting, we just started wandering around. Finally, somebody in our group found someone that knew what was going on and they told us where to go. It was such a debacle. There was no announcement made or anything. And we had someone with us who was French so language was no excuse.
