Flight Report : BA 932 London Heathrow - Dusseldorf
27 October 2026
9:15 - 11:40

Dusseldorf has been on my bucket list for quite some time. I've been here before. 20 years ago, my friend who was living in the Netherlands at the time suggested driving 2 hours there on a Friday night for a good ramen dinner. I thought it was a crazy idea, but after the meal, I agreed it was worth the journey. Dusseldorf has a large Japanese expat community so the Japanese food here is bound to be authentic and delicious. It's only an hour's flight from London, and hotel prices are quite affordable. 170 pounds later, I'm off to a few days hoping for a gastronomic adventure! With a 9:15am flight out of Heathrow, I was up bright and early for the ride to the airport. I did consider taking the train to save a little money, but it ended up being a very smart choice to take rideshare because the Elizabeth Line dropped dead for the morning due to a casualty on the track. Southern England was emerging from 2 storms over the weekend and the forecast called for sunshine emerging later in the morning. So I was a bit surprised when I got an email that today's flight would be delayed 35 minutes to 9:50am due to Storm Chloe, another weather system brewing nearby but it was nowhere near impacting London. Actually, this system wasn't officially named yet in the news. Check-in and security were smooth and I was air-side with no gate number available. Typical of Heathrow, which doesn't give this information until it's too close to departure, I headed to an empty gate to relax a bit and await updates of further delays. The British start preparing for Christmas very early. Back during the summer when it was still short-sleeves weather, a major department store already opened their Christmas shop. Here at Terminal 5, Fortnum & Mason had a nice display on its windows. We ended up getting allocated an A gate and being in group 3, I had no trouble boarding and finding my way to my window seat. The priority groups were called quite early on and we were held on the bridge. I suppose it might be better this way than sitting in a cramped gate area and with the delay, hopefully could speed boarding up a bit. We finished boarding at 9:44am and pushed back 6 minutes later. We would make a long taxi to the other side of the airport to take off towards the west, passing Terminals 3 and 2 along the way with some decent plane spotting. The weather forecast was accurate, with blue skies starting to peek out as we took off at 10:11am. Having flown BA many times for short-haul in the past 2 years, I'm quite accustomed to their service on board. They give out a snack and a bottle of water for free, followed by the for-purchase cart. With a flight time of a little over an hour, this routine was manageable for the crew. Compare that to Cathay, whose crew need to serve a hot meal on a tray to all passengers for a similar-length flight from Hong Kong to Taipei. This was my first time receiving a flapjack, which was sweet and delicious. It was a smooth and uneventful flight and it didn't take long before we started descending into Dusseldorf. We flew past the city to the south and looped around to land. With a right window seat, the skyline was unfortunately on the other side. We landed at 12:02pm. This isn't a Lufthansa hub, and plane spotting is quite good with a few Condor aircraft and a number of other airlines. I wonder what is the A340 doing here? I'm guessing because we got in late, we couldn't get a proper gate and ended up in a remote stand. Having entered Europe a few times since EES came into effect, I skipped the registration kiosks and went for the immigration line right away. It wasn't a long wait to be manually processed. My fingerprints were taken but the officer asked when did I depart from Bilbao, which was my last trip into the EU a month earlier. I had read missing data was a common problem with EES and I dug through my mails to find the flight ticket for the officer to see and then update in the system. Then I got an entry stamp. With no luggage, I was out land-side within 30 minutes, a pretty good feat. There are 3 ways to get into the city from the airport. The traditional way is to take the Skytrain to the airport train station to transfer to the S1. Alternatively, there is another S-bahn station right at the airport terminal, appropriately named Flughafen Terminal, which is served by S11. The third and newest way is the U-bahn, but I didn't see signs for that station in the arrivals hall. I had checked the schedules beforehand and there was a S11 leaving soon, and it took less than 15 minutes to reach the main train station. I was charged the standard city fare of 3.76 euros using the app. Another solid flight on BA although we ended up a little bit delayed arriving. Nevertheless, there were no bad surprises and Dusseldorf's airport is quite close to the city. And I had a good first meal in Little Tokyo!