TRIP REPORT: Air Serbia's “ghost flight” from London

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Written by Stan from London

Flying the "Ghost Flight": LHR-BEG in Business Class

Flight date: October 2019

Flight number: JU 389 (LHR-BEG) a.k.a. “Ghost Flight”

Aircraft: Airbus A320 A6-EIC

Seeing as the extra second daily flight between London Heathrow and Belgrade will only exist until the end of the IATA summer flying schedule (end October 2019), I was quite keen to be one of the few passengers to take this rather unusual flight, a by-product of the scarcity of takeoff & landing slots at London’s Heathrow airport. As many readers here will know, another of Etihad’s (EY) investments that formed part of the Etihad Alliance Partners was Jet Airways of India. After struggling with a series of challenges over the years, they finally succumbed to competitive pressures and declared bankruptcy at the start of the season. At some point over the course of Etihad’s involvement, EY would have assumed control of Jet’s 3 daily Heathrow slot pairs and presumably leased them back, in much the same way they did and continue to do with Alitalia’s LHR slots. The slot rules at Heathrow (and other slot constrained/coordinated airports in the EU) are subject to a ‘use it or lose it’ principal whereby you need to operate 80% of the frequencies for which you have slots. EY managed to scramble aircraft to operate an additional double daily LHR-Abu Dhabi and came to some kind of agreement with Air Serbia to operate a daily LHR-BEG flight with Etihad aircraft and crew, but with distribution of seats via Air Serbia and with an Air Serbia (JU) flight number. Speculation for how they came to this agreement has been subject to much discussion and debate on this forum!

As for the flight itself, it’s a 20:25 departure from Heathrow T4, with a scheduled arrival time of 00:40 into BEG. Ideal if one wants to have full use of the business day in London before flying to Belgrade. My last meeting was on The Mall in London and it finished early (16:15), so I walked 4-5 minutes to Green Park underground station and took the Piccadilly Line directly to Heathrow T4 which took just over 45 minutes. As I knew that Air Serbia’s check-in desks would likely not open until 2 hours before departure, I checked in online with my mobile phone on the journey to the airport itself and was assigned seat 2A in business class, of which Etihad have 12 seats in a 2-2 configuration in rows 1-3. This allowed me to go through security (Fast Track – took about 1 minute) and into the Etihad lounge, which was renamed to “The House” at some point earlier in 2019. There have been a few changes to it, but it hasn’t changed much since my last visit in 2018 and it is still an excellent lounge. Having not eaten since breakfast, I ordered the soup of the day (broccoli and pea) and the Za’atar spiced chicken. There was also a selection of cooked items and a salad on the buffet style counter top photographed. The lounge was nearly empty at this time as the next Etihad flight to Abu Dhabi (EY 26) wasn’t departing until 21:20 so few of those passengers had checked in as yet.

The Etihad lounge also has a very well stocked bar, with an excellent selection of wines and other beverages available as well as a nice cheese and cracker board.

The inbound flight from Belgrade lands just after 18:00 and therefore has a long layover, due to the fact that that slot was timed for a widebody Jet Airways flight to/from Delhi with longer turnaround times then required for a narrowbody A320 operation from Belgrade. I left the lounge at 20:20 for the short (~1 minute) walk to gate 19, the gate that seems to always be used for Air Serbia flights.

After turning the corner, there was literally not a single passenger waiting to board the aircraft! It was about 22/23 minutes before departure. When I got to the gate, I asked on the load for the flight and the total passenger count was 20, on a 132 passenger a/c.

Unfortunately due to it being dark and the reflection of light from the window, I wasn’t able to get a picture of the non-descript white tailed EY A320.

Upon entering the plane, friendly and attentive EY crew greeted me and I took the chance to photograph the business class seat, as well as the economy section of the plane. There were 4 pax in business class and 16 in economy. It turned out I was the second last passenger to board, with one more economy class pax who had clearly been running to the gate the last onboard the aircraft at about 20:35.

Upon sitting down, I noticed to my disappointment that the personal entertainment system had been covered up (or removed?), so there was literally no IFE at all in business class as no on-board WI-FI system or app like Air Serbia has (when it works that is!). The seats are very comfortable and familiar to anyone who has flown with Etihad on their narrowbody a/c.

Shortly after taking my seat, the flight crew came by with a selection of Serbian language newspapers, so I helped myself to the tabloid Blic – always an entertaining read (even if it’s mostly pictures!)

Food and drink menu’s were also distributed, with a decent selection available. I went for the drumsticks. The food options are some way off what they used to be at the beginning of the Air Serbia “experiment” in 2013-2015/6 when they essentially scaled back their business class product - both the hard product (seats and IFE) and soft product (catering). We pushed back from gate 19 almost exactly on time and taxied across runway 9R to the line-up for runway 27R. It was a short wait and we were airborne just about 21:00.

The flight itself was uneventful and after the dinner service, I had a couple of rakija to wash it all down prior to the captain coming onto the PA to announce our descent into BEG (~00:05) and we pulled into gate A7 at 00:25.

Part of the reason that the flight has such a low load factor is clearly connected with the fact that it doesn’t time well with connections from North America (which all arrive before about 12:00/13:00 into LHR) and the fact that the arrival into BEG doesn’t connect only any other flights departing before the next morning (ie. 5/6 hours later). On the walk from gate A7 towards passport control, we walked past the last departure (Aeroflot to Moscow SVO). Passport control took 30 seconds and as I only had hand luggage I was in the arrivals hall and into a taxi by 00:40 (scheduled arrival time!).

All in all, this flight exists for one purpose only - to baby sit Etihad’s slots - and serves close to zero commercial value to anyone (regardless of the details of this loss making arrangement). That said, as a passenger it was almost like being in a private jet!

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