Inside the “Aircraft”

My expectations were very low to begin with. I was expecting a "Disco Stu", 70’s run down aircraft with orange and yellow seats and rude flight attendants. To my amazement the flight attendant who greeted us at the door of the aircraft was all smiles and the plane did not seem that old. The seats were standard blue color and I noticed personal entertainment screens behind every seat. I was relieved.

The plane had 3x4x3 configuration having 10 seats per row in the economy section. I quickly found my wife and son and put away my luggage. There was another passenger in our section of the four seats. He had already introduce himself to my wife and son. I assumed he was going to Germany. I decided to take the aisle seat and the other elderly gentleman had the other aisle seat. My wife and son were in the middle. As we settled in, he introduced himself as Jim, he was from Oklahoma and he said he was going to India for the first time. He seemed like a down to earth person from the south, talked a lot and barely fit in his seat. He noticed one of the flight attendant who was extremely skinny (sort of like alley Mcbeal) and commented that he could tell right away she was not an American (obviously because of her weight, it was not a racist comment).

We were offered orange juice before the take off, most of the flight attendants were quiet responsive and courteous. We took off around 11:15am after over 4 hours of delays.

During or soon after the take off they showed a safety video at the end of which they had a how to section on using the “toilets”.

To my knowledge Air India is the only airline that does this because the soon after the take off lavatories won’t pass a third world standard in some of the cases. It's probably not the airline's fault but they do a little to keep the bathrooms clean. It seems that some passengers don’t know or don’t care about personal hygiene, germ theory or courtesy to others. I got a picture of this announcement on my digital camera.

The air plane did seem it was from the 80’s because the screen resolution was really bad and everything squeaked a lot.