Edinburgh from Warsaw made easier

For the first time in my eight trips to Edinburgh, I managed to fly direct from Warsaw (if one can consider a flight from Modlin 'direct'). To get to Modlin, I took the Metro from the office to Dworzec Gdański, from there a Koleje Mazowieckie train to Modlin station, and from there a bus to the airport. Now that I'm over 60, I can get a 35% discount on the KM tickets, and with my Zone 1 quarterly pass, my travel to W-wa Choszczówka is free. And so I end up paying 12.82zł (£2.70) for the journey.

From Modlin to Edinburgh, and that's Edinburgh Airport, in the city of Edinburgh and not 50km away as some low-cost airports can be. The flight is entirely in hours of darkness, so I have an aisle seat for a quick getaway. Tickets from Warsaw to Edinburgh can be bought for peanuts if booked well in advance and outside of school holidays. Below: boarding the flight.

Arriving in Edinburgh, I take the opportunity to take the tram into town. Opened three years ago, it is now fully operational and has become an integral part of Edinburgh's public transport. Now, the fare structure of the tram system (just one line - airport to York Place in the centre) is controversial. You can travel nearly the entire route, from York Place to Ingliston Park+Ride (one stop short of the airport), for just £1.60. But go that one stop further, and you pay £5.50. Clearly a mechanism to get the tourists to pay more than their fair share towards the upkeep of the tramway. If you want to save £3.90, you can walk from the airport terminal to Ingliston P+R, it's around 1.5km (1 mile or around 1,800 paces).

The trams were built in Spain specially for the Edinburgh contract to meet the city's specific requirements. They are bi-directional, with a driver cab at either end and doors on both sides.

Below: Gogarburn tram stop, for the huge Royal Bank of Scotland campus. At the edge of town. Trams during the rush hours are frequent, one every seven minutes, and heavily used.

 

Left: West End Princes Street tram stop, with the Charlotte Chapel in the background.

Another point to note with the tram fares; you need to buy your ticket before boarding; there are two ticket machines at each stop. Banknotes aren't accepted and change is not given; minimum credit card transaction is £3.00. So if you want to buy a £1.60 ticket, best have that exact amount in cash. I didn't so I ended up paying for an unnecessary £3.20 return ticket just that the transaction would come to over the £3.00 minimum.

Coming back to Warsaw, my flight at 19:25 from Edinburgh left and arrived on time, I was at Modlin groundside at 23:20, the Modlin Bus (33zł) left at 23:40 and arrived outside the Palace of Culture at 00:20; I caught the last Metro from Centrum towards Kabaty at 00:27 and a taxi from Wilanowska home (35zł), where I arrived just before 01:00.

All of which goes to show that Edinburgh and Warsaw now have excellent connections, all the more reason for Varsovians to visit Edinburgh and Edinburgers to visit Warsaw!

This time two years ago:
Stuffocation: the rich-world problem of dealing with too many things

This time five years ago:
Heroes on the wall

This time seven years ago:
Tax dodge or public service? 

This time eight years ago:
Warsaw's woodlands in autumn

This time nine years ago:
Still here, the early snow

This time ten years ago:
Another point of view

Fog hits Modlin badly

Another foggy day. I notice that there's more movement in the sky above Jeziorki, and check Flight Radar 24.Yes, indeed. Modlin's out of action (due to its lack of Instrument Landing System or ILS), and flights are being diverted to Okęcie.

Below: a Ryanair flight that's had to land at Okęcie makes an attempt to land at Modlin. It gets down to 200m (yellow line) but no lower - and at that altitude, the decision is taken to fly off. Meanwhile, to the west, over Gmina Sanniki, a WizzAir flight from Luton gets the order to divert to Okęcie. [Two screenshots from FlightRadar24.com merged into one for the sake of brevity, by the way. Click to enlarge.]

I decide to take a stroll down to the airport after lunch. The fog's dreadful. I reach the level crossing just by the end of the runway before I can make any visual contact with landing aircraft. Below: with a wide-angle lens, I scan the sky in the direction of the aircraft noise - this is the best image I can get.

Below: this is an Bombardier Q400 coming in over the railway line, at first sight, I took it for an ATR 72. Enlarged photo shows (just!) wheels coming out of engine nacelles rather than from fuselage sponsons.

Below: Airbus? Embraer? Can't tell. Vertical height as it goes over the fence... 200m?

Below: here, I can tell that this is a LOT Embraer ERJ 175. The trees give an impression of scale. This plane's over the fence and approaching the end of the runway.

Below: a Dassault Falcon 7X, three-engined business jet, approaching the runway threshold.

Below: runway lighting at Okęcie; these gantries run in a line from the airport fence to the edge of the runway, a pulsing light is augmented with fog lights.

Okęcie has Category II ILS, Cat IIIC being the highest. Cat II allows for a decision height no lower than 30m (100 ft), and a runway visual range not less than 350m (1,150 ft).

This time two years ago:
Local elections - the lure of ultra-localism

This time three years ago:
Synchronicity of shape: Powiśle, California and Hanger Lane

Back home late

Our WizzAir flight [W6 1306 29 JUL 1245] from 'London' Luton to Monty Modlin International was delayed - not by 45 minutes, or some piffling short time like that - but by nine and half hours.

Having received an SMS from WizzAir saying that due to the Olympics we should turn up for our flight three hours early, we dutifully did, returned our car to EasyRent at 'Luton' Slip End (a good way from the airport) in time to get to check-in with the above-mentioned margin. Once again, I was taken in by Wizz - it was ludicrous scaremongering. Though there were crowds, check-in and security were Most efficient, so once again, we ended up airside with plenty of time to do nothing but wait.

It soon transpired that our flight (due to depart at 12:45) was late; departure time was given as 13:30. The gate was called, we boarded, just as the sky began to darken dramatically. Just as the plane nosed onto the runway, the heavens opened, accompanied by lightning. The take-off was aborted. As second attempt was also aborted. The captain told us we'd have to refuel before we could try to take off again. We waited on the apron amid a biblical downpour. It would be too risky to refuel with all this lightning about. The storm passed - but the crew could now no longer fly as they'd exceed their maximum hours of work. A new crew needed to be flown in. A bus came and took us back to the terminal building three hours after we'd left it.

I have no gripes with safety in the air. Better that the captain had twice aborted take-off than we crash. Better than we have a fresh crew than have one trying to get us back to Modlin that has been working continuously for the past 14 hours. And there was no lack of information; we were kept up to date pretty well in the circumstances (nine flights affected out of Luton by the storm).

Right: our plane parked up on the apron under angry skies - it would remain here for several hungry hours. We received but £5 in vouchers to sustain us - and here's my gripe. This was enough to buy Eddie and me two sandwiches, one fruit salad and one fruit juice. Not enough to sustain body and soul for the extra seven hours by which we were delayed. And once we'd boarded the plane that would finally fly us to Poland - over twelve hours after we'd arrived at Luton - the food was full price. This is extremely poor customer service. No nod towards the tired and hungry passengers who would fly into Modlin not at 16:10 as per timetable (in effect the contract we had with WizzAir) but at 01:40. By the time we'd got our bags off the carousel and gone through customs, it was 02:00. Meteorological acts of God one can accept as things that airlines have to bear in mind when it comes to operational issues - but please - don't let your passengers go hungry!

Above: revolt of the Polish mums and grans at Luton. Despite the rain, the aircrew kept us waiting on the stairs for a good 20 minutes. It was chilly for those in T-shirts; small children, extremely tired, extremely hungry and getting colder by the minute. The mums marched up the stairs, entered the plane and stood their ground. Extra customer training needed for WizzAir staff is a must. Below: also tired and hungry and lugging a trendy 'retro' suitcase rather than a more practical one with wheels, Eddie makes his way to the terminal building at Monty Modlin International. We should have been here at 16:10 on Sunday; this is 01:40 on Monday.

The rest of the journey home went without a hitch. A bus took us to central Warsaw for 33zł each in a mere 40 minutes (the roads are pretty much empty at this time). The bus terminates at the Uniwersam car park on Al. Jerozolimskie, by W-wa Śródmieście WKD. A taxi (CitiTaxi corporation) was on hand to take us home at a 1.80zł/km fare, which came to 50zł. Rapid, efficient and cheap - from leaving the airport to getting back to Jeziorki took us a little over an hour and cost 116zł for the two of us. Modlin is not a such bad place to fly to.

WizzAir again? I don't like their 'cut every corner' approach to customer care. They could have given £10 vouchers and handed out free food on board. That would have made all the difference between being seen as a sympathetic carrier and one that tries to screw the customer at every turn.

WizzAir again? We'll be booking early for Christmas - with BA to London proper - London Heathrow. Eddie says 'Wizz never again'. I'm not so sure - one gets what one pays for, tak krawiec kraje, jak mu materii staje, as Monty Modlyn's old dad must have said.

Well, it's quarter to five - broad daylight outside, time to get some sleep. I have two TV and one radio appearance today...

First flight from Modlin

After seeing the airport on its open day, time to return to use it in earnest. Nowhere near as convenient as Okecie; it's 55km from our house. After the horror stories in the media about Modlin's opening day (especially about the 12 people not let on the Luton flight because of the slowness of security), we arrived 20 minutes before check-in opened. Others had the same idea - there were over 50 people in the queue for the flight to Luton in front of us. Check-in opened five minutes late, and the first people (a family of three) took a full 20 minutes to proceed to security. At this pace, there would be a return of what happened on Monday... The authorities took action. Suddenly, another three check-in desks were opened, and half an hour later we were air-side. At present, there is nothing air-side. It reminds me of Terminal Etiuda - the worst cattle-shed in the history of air travel, especially when your flight is delayed by seven hours and you are with two small children and its just before Christmas. No restaurants, no cafés, no newsagents, no bars, no duty-free shops - just a few over-priced vending machines. And worst of all - not enough seats at the gate for all the passengers due to board the flight.

Despite everything, Eddie and I boarded the flight on time (above), which departed on time, and landed at 'London' Luton on time. We got through passport control briskly, thanks to our use of the special lane for UK citizens with biometric passports. As it transpired, the machine didn't work, either for Eddie or for me or for the other bloke using the biometric passport lane, but it was so much faster than the other queues.

Time then to find our hire car. WizzAir passes its customers onto a website called CarTrawler, which gets good deals on car rental. I get a Hyundai i10 for ten days for £197 from EasyRent. (And a further £130 for zero-excess insurance cover - car hire companies claw back the low hire charges with extortionate fees for tiny scratches they insist were not on the car before you drove off in it.)  A bus takes us to a distant village where there's an airport car park and EasyRent's HQ. It's not just raining - the deluge is so intense that I can't hear what the woman at EasyRent is saying to me. "It's been like this since Easter," she explains, apologetically. A guy rushes us to the car under a large umbrella; while he's explaining how all the controls work, the driver's seat is sodden. There's no chance of inspecting the car for scratches or minor dings in this weather. We drive off towards London through a biblical downpour, the poor wipers barely able to keep up with the volumes of rain being deposited on the windscreen.


Eddie observes that England is visually richer than Poland, both the greenness of the landscape and the wealth of the houses, many of which are over a hundred years old.

We pass lots of bedraggled schoolchildren labouring home in the rain and realise that while Eddie's been on holiday these last four weeks, it's been term time in British schools, which continue to function until the end of this week. Shouldn't Polish schools have longer teaching terms? I blame Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, PiS premier whose only legacy was extending Polish school summer holidays from nine weeks to ten (and yes, he was a school teacher before becoming a politician). At a stroke, he cut the amount of tuition a Polish child receives by 2%.

And so to London, traffic so bad that I have cramp in my right shin from operating the clutch pedal. Finally we arrive at my parents' house; it's half past five UK time (half past six in Warsaw), seven and half hours after leaving home.

More about Modlin

Some more facts from yesterday's visit, from the Pani Edyta, the tour guide.

• The building of the airport - the entire investment - cost 350m złotys. The refurbishment of Warsaw Okęcie's first terminal (the maroony-purple one) will cost 380m zlotys, to put it into perspective.
• There's no radar at Modlin. The airport will use the radar at Okęcie.
• Only two types of aircraft will initially use the airport - the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320.
• Birds are scared off by recorded avian distress calls played through speakers around the airport's perimeter, occasional explosions, and a falconer with his bird of prey - said to be the most effective.
• The Marshal of Mazowieckie province, Adam Struzik, is keen on extending the rail spur that will serve the airport terminal on to Płock - his home town, 70km to the west.
• Local residents might complain about the fact that the airport's in use 24/7, but modern jet airliners make much less noise than the Soviet-era military jets that roared in and out of Modlin until 2000.
• The terminal building is not equipped with air-conditioning. Which will not make it a comfortable place to spend two hours before your flight, but is in keeping with the low-cost travel philosophy.

Wikipedia has this page about Modlin airport. As of today, Modlin is not yet shown on FlightRadar24.com. Flying into Modlin, your baggage will be tagged 'WMI'.

Modlin Airport - not a chimera

Yes, it's here - yes it exists - but will it be ready on 16 July? Poland's first all-new passenger airport to open in 44 years had its open-day today - thousands came to see Modlin, but there's still a question mark over whether Poland's civil aviation office (Urząd Lotnictwa Cywilnego) will sign off the runway as being ready for commercial passenger use in time. [Incidentally, urząd = 'office', biuro = 'office', but urząd does not mean the same as biuro.]

Rumours of the non-existence of Modlin Airport may have something to do with the fact that all the way up the siódemka ('national route 7') from Warsaw to the turn-off for it there is not one single road sign telling you where it is. Modlin Airport is actually easy to get to by car - head up the Wisłostrada, cross the river, take the first right after the Vistula onto DK62 (ul. Generała Wiktora Thommée - named after the Polish general who commanded the garrison that defended Modlin in September 1939) and first left off that. Easy.

There will be a bus service from town to Modlin (operated by Translud) for 33 złotys one way, or else take a Koleje Mazowieckie train to Modlin station (12.50 złotys), a bus will take you to the terminal (4 złotys). By 2014 (it is said), there will be a direct rail spur to the airport. But then the viaduct taking ul. Poloneza over the S2 was meant to have been ready by December 2010 and Jeziorki's still waiting. The bus is quicker than the train at night, the train quicker than the bus during peak hours.

The old website gives the impression that the former military airport is still little more than a planner's dream; Google searches throw up this site ahead of the new one, so confusion is expected (note to Modlin airport managers - find yourselves a search engine optimiser this week or it will be thin).

Anyway, today's dzień otwarty was a great opportunity to see the place a mere eight days before it (hopefully!) opens, and for the airport authorities it was a chance to see how the place works in practice. In the morning, people were invited to come along with dummy 'luggage' and enact check-in - suitcases were weighted and scanned; for the rest of the day, pretend passengers were allowed to test security.

Above: the drop-off zone in front of the terminal. As no one was flying anywhere today, and the temperature topped at 34C, dress code was... informal. Jaguar owner boasting of Knightsbridge address?

Above: departures hall. Information board can show up to 22 flights simultaneously (only). This is Poland's first purpose-built low-cost airport. No sleeves to take passengers to planes - no coaches - you walk from the gate. Planes are to be turned around in 25 minutes. The result should be fares significantly lower than from Okęcie.

Above: the guided tour takes visitors air-side. We can see the runway, 2.5km long, and 60m wide (the old military runway was 80m wide). No radar - that's based at Okęcie.

Above: we go back via the arrivals area. We are told that customs officers are not only looking for the usual drugs, tobacco, alcohol and foreign currency smugglers - they will also be looking for crocodile-skin belts and fake Nike T-shirts and Louis Vuitton handbags - you have been warned! Baggage reclaim is just around the corner.

Modlin will be open 24 hours a day, low-cost carriers first (WizzAir and RyanAir), though there are hopes that charter flights will start to fly from here in the autumn.

Above: vue générale of the Modlin terminal. Location-wise, to put into perspective with other European low-cost airports, as the crow flies, Modlin is 35km from Warsaw city centre. 'Brussels' Charlesroi is 45km from the centre of Brussels, 'Glasgow' Prestwick is 45km from Glasgow, 'London' Stansted is 50km from London, 'Paris' Beauvais is 70km from Paris, while 'Frankfurt' Hahn is a 102km from Frankfurt! (note - these are 'as the crow flies' distances and do not compare actual travelling time).

If the waiting list for your very own Clément Ader Éole or Avion III is too long, you can always consider buying a Polish-built Ornithopter (above) for your aerial commute.

The open day was well organised and fun for all. Above: musical entertainment laid on - a covers band that stuck to 1970s British music - Smokie, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Dire Straits.

Above: cooling things down on a scorching day, the Modlin airport fire brigade showed off their kit - and I hope it's never used in earnest. The open-day was a great example of community and customer relations, fostering pride that another infrastructure project has been completed (though I still worry about our flight on 18 July - will the ULC give its approval on time?)

This time last year:
Along Austro-Hungary's strategic railway

This time two years ago:
Gone is the threat of Państwo Smoleńskie

This time three years ago:
Get on your bike and RIDE!

This time four years ago:
Moles in my own garden

Modlin Airport connected by rail - but will it open on time?

As of Friday, 29 June, one can travel to Warsaw's new airport at Modlin by train. According to Rozklad.pkp.pl, the service operates around the clock, which is useful, as check-in for WizzAir's popular 6:00 departure to 'London' Luton opens at 4am. The airport's press release mentions a bus service, coordinated with the train arrivals and departures, to take passengers on to the airport. There's a train arriving at Modlin station at 3:20 and the next at 3:51. A bit of an all-nighter then.

Eddie and I are booked to fly on the third day of operations at Modlin (rather than taking the night train across Europe - booking the tickets proved simply too complicated and the passport checks on Eurostar take longer than the journey to London). It is still possible, on 18 July, that the airport will not be open - this alarming piece in Dziennik Gazeta Prawna suggests that Poland's civil aviation authority has not yet signed off the airport for commercial flights.

Modlin was meant to serve as Warsaw's low-cost airport back in 2006, but things being as they are it did not happen, nor did Modlin open in time for the Euro 2012 championships. So - what's the chances that the airport will open now? What if it isn't - will WizzAir revert back to Okęcie? What about the slots it's given up?

Watch this space...