Monarch Airlines Airbus A300 600 seat review by Capvermell #27023

This was the most unbelievably clapped out, cramped and antiquated old tub I had travelled on in years and I could not believe an aircraft this old and behind the times had not been pensioned off to a third world airline by now. Monarch's extremely foolish decision to carry on flying these charter configuration aircraft on what they laughingly call scheduled flights has totally destroyed my previously good image of the airline when flying on more modern Airbus A321s on the same route.

I am 6ft 3in or 1.90m tall and even on a flight of only 1 hour 40 minutes in length I had to get out of my seat and walk around the gangways for 10 minutes to recover from the cramp I suffered in their steerage class seating. I had not travelled in charter class seating (now incredibly being sold to scheduled customers) this mean and uncomfortable since I had travelled on Britannia 767-200 configured with either 9 or 10 seats across many years earlier.

The aircraft had no screens or flight entertainment and the aircraft was so well used that all the lighting units down the side of the plane had visibly extremely yellowed covers.

Monarch needs to make up its mind whether it wants to be a high class scheduled carrier or a cheap and crappy carrier with worse cabin conditions than even Easyjet or Ryanair.