Flight Report : BA 965 Hamburg - London Heathrow
7 July 2026
15:10 - 15:55

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Like many relatively smaller European cities, Hamburg gets 4 flights a day to London. I preferred the afternoon departure to get good sunlight coming into London for some stunning aerial views. The next flight at 9:30pm is a bit late in the evening.

After a horrible arrival several days earlier thanks to the new EES fiasco, I didn't want to take any chances and got to Hamburg airport a full 3 hours before departure. It's a bit overkill given the flight is just over an hour long, but it's extraordinary times.

Hamburg's city centre is connected to the airport on the S1, and there is no additional surcharge to get there - it's a standard zone AB fare. But what looked easy on the map turned out less so. At Ohisdorf where the S1 splits into 2 branches, a kind person came over and reminded me only the first half of the train goes to the airport while the back half where we were in goes to Poppenbuttel - yes, the train actually splits in half and heads off in different directions.

I wish there was an English announcement on board the train about this. You would assume international tourists use this train to reach the airport and need this sort of important info ...

Here is the remaining back half of the train heading elsewhere while the front half S1 to the airport has pulled away. Luckily, the next train would arrive in a few minutes only.

The airport train station was spacious and has exits to both Terminals 1 and 2 with a departures board on the platform showing the flight and its terminal check-in location.

BA uses 3 check-in counters at the last row of Terminal 2 with 1 counter for Club Europe, another for Euro Traveller, and a bag drop lane. While I was at the front of the Club Europe line, a family was stuck at the counter for quite some time, so it got a bit odd when the Euro Traveller line cleared out and I was still waiting. People behind me were fuming about this. There are no check-in kiosks that can spit out BA boarding passes and I can't drop off my checked bag using machines either. Everything has to go through the manual counter and BA cheaped out with 3 counters only.

Notice other European airline competitors at this airport have fully embraced technology with the kiosks. I wish BA could join them.

Frustrated it took a long time to check my bag, I headed to security where the line was far shorter and I was out air-side in no time. There isn't too much variety for food here with most shops offering sandwiches. Upstairs, there was a Burger King and very few sit-down restaurants. I settled for Thai but it didn't taste too authentic and way overpriced. I guess I can't be picky in this part of the world ... but even Heathrow can do better at different food options than this airport.

The terminal was quite busy but spotting is quite interesting. I didn't see any Lufthansa planes but a bunch of Eurowings jets instead.

The air-side section is quite big and it was a long walk to the B gates. I made sure I got here early enough - an hour before departure - to find a relatively short line through passport control. However, the signage was poor since the All Passports line ended up going nowhere and merging with the EU line, but the EU line didn't lead to the EU kiosks but to the All Passports counter. Despite battling with EES earlier to enter Germany, I couldn't use the kiosk to exit so had to resort to the manual counter once again.

So with supposedly 2 lines leading to the counter, which eventually merged into 1, it got a bit messy when 1 of the 2 counters closed despite a growing group of BA and Emirates passengers. I saw the Emirates plane pull into the gate earlier and knew the ountbound passengers for Dubai are coming so it would get messy soon. I rushed to passport control hoping to beat the crowd. Then the BA crew showed up and we all stepped aside to give them priority, so processing came to a standstill.

With all that, it took a very long time to reach the counter, and it took even more time to get fingerprinted and for the staff to click through the system to process me out. While I got a stamp on arrival into Germany, I wasn't stamped on exit. I wonder if we will eventually use e-gates to exit the EU since we were fingerprinted and got a picture taken on arrival. Otherwise, EES is substantially increasing processing times and I will really think twice before visiting Europe during peak periods. I would recommend don't even bother coming in summer 2026.

Exiting passport control, it was a short walk to the gate and by then, boarding was called for group 0.

Boarding was called too early though. The priority passengers bunched up as we were held at the bridge so I was able to snap a photo of the plane's unique nose.

Despite the slight snafu getting onto the plane, eventually everyone settled into their seats on time. We pushed back a minute early and it was a short taxi to the take-off position. In less than 10 minutes after leaving the gate, we were lifting off into a cloudy and wet afternoon.

The weather above Hamburg hasn't been the greatest throughout my trip although it turned out better than the forecast. A few days when it was supposed to rain all day turned out not as wet as expected and the sun even made a brief appearance.

Today's flight looked full and the crew sprang into action quickly to serve us the typical snack and bottle of water followed by the paid cart. It is a short flight again today of about 75 minutes so after taking a doze, we were over the English Channel already.

The flight deck made an announcement we will start our descent into London and soon, I could see the English coast. I was glued to my right window looking for signs of London appearing. The weather was much nicer here but a lot hotter.

After doing a holding pattern circle, I spotted Stratford and the grand tour of London begins. You really can't get a better synopsis of London but fly into Heathrow. The approach into City airport is also great, too.

We landed on the northern runway and stopped short of the terminal as a plane was pushed out of our gate, but we ended up arriving a few minutes ahead of schedule nevertheless.

Immigration was much quicker at Heathrow with barely a line for non-digital passports although there was only 1 counter open. The luggage didn't take too long to come out so the whole arrival process was a lot smoother than departing Hamburg.

The BA flight experience is quite consistent on these short European flights. The airport experience in Hamburg was abysmal but it's an EES issue and not something the airport authorities or airline can fix. Hopefully the pressure will mount as the summer peak season pushes the whole system to breaking point and this whole fiasco can come to an end.

Europe is not the first place in the world to photograph and fingerprint tourists. The Japanese have been doing this for years and the lines do get long but European airports are not built with many counters handling non-EU passengers.