Airline: Aer Lingus
Flight #: EI724
Route: ORK-LHR
Class: Economy
Seat: 25A
Date: Sunday 13th July 2025
Having had a great weekend exploring in and around Cork (read about that here and here), it was time to head home. Unlike my last trip to Cork where I took a circuitous route home via Dublin with Iarnród Éireann and Aer Lingus Regional (read those posts here and here), this time we’d be taking a more direct route with Aer Lingus from Cork to London Heathrow. This flight would be the other ‘half’ of the roundtrip that we flew to Cork on, with the early evening departure from Cork forming the late evening return flight from England.
We ended up arriving at the airport in a taxi from our hotel at 1735, just under three hours before our flight, and spent a few minutes sorting our bags before heading to security. Whilst not quite as quick as Heathrow, it still only took us 10 minutes from joining the queue to reaching departures, with the longer time mostly accounted for by Cork still having the old style scanners that require liquids and electronics to be removed from your bags. The rest of the extra time was due to Beth being randomly selected to have her bag swabbed. Was it really random selection or does she just look a bit dodgy?…
Cork is quite a small airport which feels a bit like a mini-Stansted, with a large glass and steel terminal building, although unlike Stansted you actually get good views of the apron and runway from the departure lounge. With Cork not having an Aer Lingus lounge, I’d not bothered to pay the extra for the ‘advantage’ fare for this leg as the key benefit wasn’t available, however I was disappointed to find that Cork also didn’t have a ‘pay to access’ lounge. As such, with over two and a half hours until our flight would depart, we headed to Food Republic for some dinner, before finding some seats in the departure lounge that looked out over the apron and settling down to wait.
Our aircraft for this flight was the same as the one that had brought us to Cork from Heathrow, EI-NSB. This three-and-a-half-year-old Airbus A320neo is named St. Aidan and landed at Cork at 1947 on a flight from Heathrow. From what I can tell of Aer Lingus’ operations at Cork, it has a pair of Airbus A320neos based in the city at any one time, with one doing round trips to Heathrow, whilst the other operates the airline’s flights to other destinations. After a quick 20-minute turnaround to offload the inbound passengers and clean the aircraft, boarding of our flight started from gate 5 at 2007 and we were onboard the aircraft just five minutes later.
Our seats for this flight back to London were 25A & B on the lefthand side near the back of the plane. These seemed to have a little less legroom than row 2 which we’d been in on the flight to Cork, but had a decent placed window and the same other ‘in seat’ amenities such as coat hooks and power sockets. Boarding was completed fairly quickly and we pushed back from the stand at 2026 and began our very short taxi to the runway at 2031. Just four minutes later we were taking off from runway 16 and climbed pretty much straight into the bank of grey clouds that had covered Cork for the afternoon.
That same bank of cloud that covered southern Ireland seemingly also covered the Irish Sea and most of Wales, with just a short break over Swansea. Thankfully, as we reached England, the skies cleared and I was able to see the former Filton Airport to the north-west of Bristol, along with the M4/M5 interchange and some of the Severn Estuary. Our route across southern England took us over the North Wessex Downs National Landscape and on a path between Newbury and Basingstoke before we flew over Farnborough and Woking to pass Heathrow on the ‘downwind leg’ to the south of the airport. Continuing over Epson and Sutton, we began a sweeping left turn over Croydon that took us over Brixton and Clapham Junction to line up on Heathrow’s approach over Hammersmith.
58 minutes after taking off from Cork, we touched down on Heathrow’s runway 23R, with Aer Lingus’ ‘retro jet’ EI-DVM arriving from Dublin immediately behind us. Annoyingly this overtook us on our way to the gate as the delayed EI-NSE was still using our stand, and we had a bit of a wait on a taxiway near the tower to wait for that aircraft to finish its departure prep. A bit of clever routing from the Ground Controller saw us taxi past EI-NSE as it was pushed back and arrive onto the stand as the tug was still being disconnected. Unfortunately, this delay to the Dublin flight meant that we didn’t arrive on stand until 15 minutes after we landed and we eventually made it off the aircraft at 2156. However, this delay was quickly recovered by the speedy arrivals process for flights from Ireland and we were into Arrivals five minutes later.
Overall, this flight was comfortable, peaceful and uneventful, and a nice way to end our adventure to Ireland. Despite the delay getting to the stand, our quick flight time from Cork meant we arrived on stand only three minutes after our advertised arrival time, so I can’t even really complain about that delay. And anyway, it gave me a bit of plane spotting time on the ground at Heathrow. All in all, I’m glad we chose Aer Lingus and Heathrow as our route to and from Cork, as I found the journeys much calmer and more comfortable than equivalent flights with the other Irish airline and Stansted.
Lounge 0*
Seat/Facilities 4*
Food 3*
Service 5*
Punctuality 5*
Overall Rating 17/25 (read about my rating system here!)
Flights & Times 