Long before embarking on my epic return trip to Bali I had another scheme in the making, for a limited time Finnair was scheduled to operate their A350 on a series of flights between London and Helsinki.
This is standard practice for airlines taking delivery of new aircraft, the planes are overstaffed in order to familiarise as many crew-members as possible with the new product, on a short flight, before being scheduled on longer routes.
The A350 was not only a first for Finnair but also the first aircraft of its kind to fly to and from either Helsinki or London Heathrow.
Unfortunately, given my action packed schedule, I would need to take these flights within a couple of days of returning from Indonesia. Jet lag is usually easy enough to deal with but here I was planning on flying home from Asia, re-entering the UK after the clocks had switched back to winter time and then planned to fly back two time zones towards Asia, to a city which gets dark at 4pm in the winter months.
This was going to be a test.
However, there was no way that I was going to pass up on this chance; particularly given that I could get the Friday evening flight out, returning on a Sunday afternoon (the holy grail of weekend trips!). I would be maximising my time away and would get around 6 hours of total flight time in a brand new flat bed seat for the very reasonable price of 30,000 Avios and £126.71
The good news for all of you reading this is that Finnair has now made the A350 a permanent fixture on the LHR-HEL route, 5x per week. If you are on flight AY0831 or AY0832, you can recreate this trip for yourself (although these are both morning flights). If you want to be sure that you’ll get the A350, when using Avios, you’ll be able to tell because the Aircraft type will be blank as opposed to showing the usual: “A320”
