Wolfsburg; Thursday, 04 September, 2025

When I’d originally booked the flight to Hannover it was due to depart in the late evening, but a few weeks out BA moved the flight time forward, so I had to spend the afternoon working out of an airport hotel if I wanted any chance of making the flight.

Even then it was pretty tight, finishing at 5 I made it to the airport just after 17:30 and by the time I’d cleared security the gate was already open at the far end of the terminal. Thankfully the time between BA opening the gate and actually starting boarding is usually pretty lengthy and by the time I reached gate A5 they had only just started boarding passengers with children and those requiring assistance.

For most of the day both Flight Aware and the BA app were predicting a 20-30 minute delay on departure and arrival, so with everyone boarded and the plane all closed up and ready to go with 10 minutes to spare I was expecting the captain to say we were going to have to sit there and wait for the delay, but 5 minutes later we were pushing back for the long taxi to the other end of the airport, but even then we pretty much rolled the whole way and were airborne only 10 minutes after our scheduled pushback time.

A slightly odd flight to begin with as the plane only climbed to a couple of thousand feet to keep it between several layers of cloud, we didn’t really climb until we were almost out over the English channel, and the final climb up was a bit bumpy to get there.

After that it was a pretty smooth flight and we touched down nearly 20 minutes ahead of our scheduled arrival, pulling up on stand just 5 minutes later. There was then a pretty quick journey through immigration where four out of the five desks were open to all passports so the non-EU were being given pretty quick checks to avoid delaying the EU passport holders. It meant that I was down on the airport station platform with nearly 10 minutes to spare before the train into the city, that I really hadn’t thought I’d catch just a couple of hours earlier.

The train got held up at several red signals along the way, which meant in the end I had a 5 minute, rather than 15 minute, connection onto the U-Bahn, which I just about made and headed out to the stop by my hotel for the night.

From landing to my room in the hotel took barely an hour and after a quick night cap in the bar I was ready to turn in for a good nights sleep.