Airline: Ryanair
Flight #: FR5738
Route: STN-GOT
Class: Economy
Seat: 24F
Date: Wednesday 22nd April 2026
With my trip to Barcelona and Andorra having been a month earlier, and our big trip to the Nordics not for another few weeks, I decided that April was the perfect time for squeeze in an extreme day trip. Having trawled Skyscanner for the best combination of price and flight times, I had settled on a destination that would help build up my excitement for our upcoming Nordics trip. And so, early on a Wednesday morning in April, I was doing my semi-regular drive down the M11 towards Stansted, ready to catch a Ryanair flight to Gothenburg, Sweden.
The trip started with one of my top travel tips, as instead of heading for the Stansted Airport car parks, I made my way to Bishop’s Stortford railway station and parked in the multi-story there. 24 hours parking there, plus a return anytime train ticket to Stansted cost me a total of £20, whereas the parking options at Stansted were a minimum of £50, saving me £30 before I’d even reached the airport. As such, I arrived at Stansted’s basement railway station at 0558 and was upstairs in the check-in area just a few minutes later where I was greeted with a horrendous queue for security and so spent a few minutes booking fast-track security. Here I discovered another top tip, as if you put ‘now’ when booking the fast-track, it costs £12, whereas if you book even 15 minutes in advance it only costs £9. Best of it is, the person checking at the entrance to the queue, doesn’t even check the timings.
Heading through into security, it turned out that whilst the queue outside security was horrendous, this was because the queuing system inside wasn’t being used and individual lanes seemed to have shorter queues than the fast-track lanes. Stansted has now completed its refurbishment of security, with all lanes now having the new style X-ray scanners that mean you no longer have to remove liquids or electronics from your bag, although at the moment liquids still need to be under 100ml. Unfortunately, my bag needed to go through the scanner a second time, which delayed me a little, and I reached departures at 0617, just under 20 minutes after I had arrived on the train.
With around an hour until the gate would be announced, I headed to the airport’s Wetherspoons, The Windmill, for breakfast and managed to grab a table in view of one of the departure boards. When the gate 42 was announced, it was a bit of a walk, around five minutes, to the northern pier, with lots of building work going on both inside (escalator works) and outside (terminal expansion) the terminal. #BoardingNotBoarding started around 45 minutes before departure, just as our aircraft arrived on its inbound flight from Gothenburg. With runway 04 in use, it had a very short taxi to the stand, and actual boarding began around 15 minutes later.
9H-QFJ was the aircraft for my flight, with this 20-year-old Boeing 737-800 having originally been delivered to Ryanair in December 2005 as EI-DHY, spending just under 2 years from April 2023 with Buzz as SP-RKY, before joining the Malta Air fleet in January 2025. The aircraft was at the time of my flight based at Gothenburg and had started its day with the flight to Stansted, having had a busy day the previous day doing round trips to Milan Malpensa, Gdansk and Alicante. Onboard it had the older ‘chunky’ interior which provides slightly more comfortable seats but has slightly less legroom than the more modern ‘streamlined’ seats. I was in seat 24F, which had a well-placed window, and I was able to get a good view of EI-ENJ parked next to us preparing for a flight to Kos.
Boarding was complete at 0757, with the front door shut two minutes later, as the flight crew made their usual pre-flight announcement which predicted a flight time of around one hour and 40 minutes. The flight was only around half full, with the back half of the aircraft relatively empty and I had the entirety of row 24 to myself. There was a bit of a delay to us pushing back, although this eventually came at 0811, with us beginning our taxi at 0815, passing DHL’s D-AEAI which was parked on a remote stand adjacent to the terminal rather than over in the cargo area. As we taxied, I was able to get a good view over to the other side of the airfield, where a Royal Brunei aircraft was parked up, along with a few of Titan Airways fleet, including the UK Government Airbus A321.
Joining the queue for departure, we were third in the queue behind a Jet2 flight to Palma and a Ryanair flight to Rome Ciampino, although we then got queue jumped by another Jet2. We took off from runway 04 at 0832 and as we climbed away, I was able to get a good overall view of the airport, with the two Ryanair piers being almost empty, whilst the other pier was still fully of Jet2 and easyJet aircraft, showing the difference in the operations between the various airlines. After departure we made a right turn to head south of Colchester towards the north sea, and with a relatively clear sky I was able to get good views of the Essex estuaries before we crossed the coast to the north of the Port of Felixstowe.
The in-flight service started less than 10 minutes after take-off and, because I had ordered via the Ryanair app, the crew came to take payment for mine and delivered my coffee and chocolate bar before they started the main service. These, along with a chicken panini cost me £12.50, although I had originally ordered a bacon roll but they had sold out on the inbound flight. It took another 10 minutes or so for the panini to be delivered and it was pretty nice, although not really a breakfast choice but whilst there was a reasonable choice of drinks and snacks, there is only a limited choice of sandwiches to choose from.
Once the service was done and dusted, the flight was uneventful, and 30 minutes into the flight we were just off the edge of The Netherlands, heading north-east across the North Sea. We crossed the Danish west coast at 0925, before flying over Billund and crossing the east coast to the northeast of Randers around 15 minutes later. Five minutes later the seat belt sign came on and I was able to see the Swedish coast getting closer outside the window, with us crossing it at 0951 as we lined up for a straight in approach to Gothenburg. Touching down on runway 03 at 1058L, seven minutes early after a flight time of 86 minutes, we had beaten the flight crew’s flight time prediction by almost 15 minutes and were at the gate after a very short taxi at 1100.
Surprisingly for a Ryanair flight, a Jetbridge was used and so we all left via the front door, meaning I was towards the back of the queue for passport control. This was slow moving due to being in the first few weeks of the EES system’s widespread use and people needing their photos and biometrics taken, and I eventually made it through after around 20 minutes of queuing. All in all the flight was a pretty standard for Ryanair, best described as cheap and cheerful, and is absolutely fine as long as you know what you paid for. Personally, the worst bit for me is all the queuing, especially #BoardingNotBoarding, but if this gets me £30 return flights, then it is what it is.
Lounge 0*
Seat/Facilities 3*
Food 3*
Service 5*
Punctuality 5*
Overall Rating 16/25 (read about my rating system here!)
Flights & Times 