HAM: needs a traffic engineer

At Hamburg Airport, there are a ton of low cost carriers. I was leaving early (0710 to FRA), and a lot of LCC flights also depart early. Air Berlin must have had 6 or 8 planes ready to go this morning. Condor (757-300... one of the longest and thinnest looking planes out there), TUIfly, Hapag were among the LCCs. Germanwings has ads in the terminal, but I didn't see any of their liveries. BA, KLM, Air France, Malev and others had flights going out this morning too. But what really surprised me was the number of Lufthansa aircraft on the ground this morning. I expected frequent flights to FRA and MUC, but there were scheduled flights to many other German and European cities. I guess I figured the train would be the preferred transport for intra-Europe routes.

On the way to the airport at 0530 this morning, I discovered some new things about Hamburg. One, they don't have a traffic engineer equipped with software that times red and green lights to enable traffic to flow. Two, they must not have in-road sensors to detect when a car approaches an intersection. My taxi must have hit every red light on the way to the airport with almost no other traffic on the road.

I wish I could describe Hamburg a little better, but again, I didn't see much beyond the hotel, the airport, and our kitchen for our event last night. Germans from other cities are very complimentary about HAM, and it comes across as a nice and fairly well-to-do city.

Very much looking forward to getting home... For a couple of days.

Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network