Last weekend my son and I went on a little spotting trip to Spain. The destination mainly was picked because Iberia (Express) offered cheap tickets - round trip DUS-MAD-DUS for EUR 100. The schedule worked just great, we flew out Saturday morning and returned Sunday night ... yes, we did despite the storm. A good friend joined us flying in from DUB. Both of the flights were scheduled to land at MAD at 10:00 am, and he beat us by like 30 seconds touching down on 32L while we were on short final for 32R after an uneventful flight.
Iberia Express is a no-frills product, so any beverages and snacks are available for purchase only. Regular cattle class seat pitch is kind of cramped (28"), so I decided to pay a little extra for emergency exit seats to save my son (6'1") and myself (6'2") from developing a thrombosis. The planned aircraft was an A320, booked seats were 14EF. So far so good, however, while on our way to DUS we found out that they had changed the leg to an A321 (EC-JGS). On a positive note, exit seats were automatically reassigned and they have ginormous legroom on the A321. Only downside was that we now had 26DE, so no window seat, but there isn't really a window in that row on the A321 anyway.
Picked up the rental car and after a couple of hours spotting at MAD - mainly because we wanted to catch the Plus Ultra A346 - we took the 3-hour drive to Teruel Airport (TEV), as my friend called it, the "Victorville of Europe". If you love to roam around aircraft bone yards, you should definitely pay this place a visit. Currently, around 70 aircraft are stored there, 90%-ish are wide-bodies including a good bunch of 4-holers. We logged 14 A340-300/-500/-600 and eight 747s, some of them obviously being on death row. Other notable finds were two Avianca A318s, an Iberia Mad Dog and an UTair-ex Continental 762. The area along the fence is very accessible and no one cared that we were taking photos through and over the fence.
After spending about two hours at TEV we returned to MAD late at night. Sunday we spent all day at various locations around MAD. Weather, unfortunately, was not so great, foggy in the mornings and overcast pretty much the entire trip, but at least it didn't rain.
Things appeared to get a little exciting when we heard about this major storm system moving in from the UK, which eventually hit Germany late Sunday afternoon and would hang around for a couple of days. Our flight was due to depart MAD at 07:50 pm, arriving at DUS at 10:35 pm, which was supposed to be near the peak time of the storm. In the meantime, most flights from various locations all across Europe scheduled to arrive at DUS between 06:00 pm-ish and 10:30 pm had already been cancelled. Nonetheless we took off - this time as planned on an A320 (EC-LXQ) - and it was a smooth flight until we started our descent into DUS. The approach was somewhat bumpy, but not as bad as expected. We made it on the first try and only skidded a bit when hitting the brakes. The Laudamotion ahead of us had to go around twice. The drive back home afterwards was far worse than the flight.
To sum it up, we had a great trip. Great value for money and nothing to complain about with Iberia.