In the sub-charter of the sub-charter: With Carpatair's “new” A319 for Air Baltic from Zurich to Riga
When I boarded an Air Baltic A220 on my Swiss flight to Zurich the day before this trip report, I had to smile a little. After all, I had received an email from Air Baltic just under 3 weeks earlier. "There is a change to your flight," it said. However, this email did not refer to the Swiss flight operated by Air Baltic, but to my Air Baltic flight from Zurich to Riga, which I had booked the following day. I had booked the flight with Air Baltic on their A220, including seat reservations, and only noticed at second glance that the "highlight" of the email was not the minimal change in departure time of 5 minutes, but the change in the operating carrier - to the Romanian Carpatair. A shock. I saw myself in their Fokker 10 again in my mind's eye after almost exactly 100 years. A quick look at the booking tool on the "BT homepage" at least reassured me that the aircraft type was an Airbus A319. As the "aviation geek" in me comes through in these moments, the next thing that followed was a prompt look in a well-known aircraft database to find out where the Carpatair A319 comes from. - (ex easyJet) (The second A319 in the fleet - which is also used by Air Baltic - had a somewhat eventful history with delivery to Hamburg International (HHI), as well as many years of use by Germania Switzerland (HolidayJet) and its successor company Chair.) So now the time had come, I found myself at the gate in Zurich. Time to give Carpatair a second chance on this almost two-hour flight to