Air Travel

We were asked to deplane at the Frankfurt airport. They handed us pink passes to board back on to the aircraft in half an hour.

Frankfurt airport doesn’t have a lot of seating options outside the gate so I was standing in the middle of the airport observing people when I saw this guy and he saw me at the same time. It was one of my co-workers who sat nearby in the office. We both couldn’t believe that we met in Germany. He was on the same flight. We shared some flight experiences and decided to have a German beer at the airport. The airport restaurant/bar/shop employees were going through a shift change so they didn’t pay attention to us for several minutes. They were busy counting their money; I finally asked if they were open and one of them said “yes” and began counting again. Finally one of them took our order and we were served a couple of cold beers. As we sat there talking about various things, someone else came by and introduced himself and his family. I knew him from college but couldn’t remember his name right away. We got back on the plane at the last minute; I had lost my overhead space for my computer bag, I settled for some space four rows away.

Around midnight we were served with Dinner, I was hungry since I didn’t really have a dinner. The food was quiet good; they offered a couple of choices. I asked for some red-wine and they gave me an airline size bottle of a French red wine. They gave us real silverware which was a nice touch. Jim had chicken, it was a little, may be a lot, spicy for his taste buds, after a couple of bites he turned red and yelled “fire, my mouth is on fire”. He asked for some water and quickly received several glasses of water to put out his fire. He said he was not used to the hot food.

As soon as we were airborne the guy in front of me reclined his seat and it almost hit me; apparently his seat reclined a lot more than usual but he was oblivious to this fact or he didn’t care. When we were served with food, I had to ask him to take the seat out of its Maharaja position so I can open my tray table. He didn’t like it very much but every time we were served food he did that on his own. I didn’t have to ask him again.

Since I could not sleep, I decided to see what “entertainment” they had provided. Earlier they had made an announcement that they had a couple of Hollywood and a couple of Bollywood movies. If you’ve seen one Bollywood movie you’ve seen most so I wanted to see if they had anything I’d like. There were 21 channels available on the in-flight entertainment system. Each channel having A and B part so there would be 42 channels. Not all were available, in fact only 4 or 5 channels had something on them. The bad part was that the available channels were not all together, You’d have to go through the entire list to find the channels with “entertainment” on them. I quickly realized that all the movies had issues with tracking. The screen kept on flickering and the audio went in and out. It seemed that they had been showing these tapes over and over for months and the quality was really poor. I tried to watch an English movie and quickly realized that the audio on my right ear was in English and in my left ear it was in German, I think. So I had to watch this movie holding my earphone to one ear and with lots of tracking and flickering issues on the screen. After a few minutes I gave up.

Near the end of the flight I decided to use the lavatories. Right behind us was the entertainment computer and VCPs where they inserted the tapes. I saw this airline guy fumbling with the tapes, they were similar to 8mm camcorder tapes with hand written titles on them. I told the guy about the English/German Audio problem, he went to the computer and said it was fixed and thanked me for telling him. I was surprised that no one had complained about this and wondered how many flights went through with this setup. Apparently on one audits the entertainment system before each flight.

After a long 8 hour long boring flight I wanted to stretch my legs at the Frankfurt airport and walk a little bit; I was hoping they would let us off the aircraft. Sometimes on delayed flights, they just park the airplane, clean around you and off you go for 8 more hours.

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.

We went through the security around 9:15pm since the boarding was scheduled to start at 9:20pm. It was a usual security check, took off my shoes, took out the computer and we were cleared quickly. We walked to Air India gate and there were about 300 people waiting about and there with a couple of Air India employees behind the desk; the display showed take off time of 10pm. There was an additional security check at the gate; they opened our carry-on luggage and took a peak and gave us the magic wand treatment. I don’t know what value this adds since we just went through the same thing a few minutes ago. Our boarding passes were stamped indicating that we went through this security and we were done with 2nd round of security in about 60 seconds. The security personnel seemed to be non air India employees and were quiet friendly. There was some sort of announcement which was hard to understand, I think they stated that they will be boarding shortly.

I noticed that 95% or more of the passengers were Indians including a lot of elderly people and kids. My son found a little playground for kids near the gate and he kept busy until the boarding started. I struck up a conversation with a homeland security agent who was there to assist foreign passengers leaving the country with the kiosks that were setup around the airport to finger print and print a record of foreigners leaving the country; he was an older Indian guy and said he had worked there for several years. He started asking me about computers and international telephony. I was surprised to learn that he knew very little about computers or telephony in general especially because he helped people with the computerized kiosks. He didn’t know how to write a URL which I gave him, I had to write it down for him. While I was talking with him, a young air-india employee with ill fitted suite came by and interrupted our conversation. The Air India employee said to the DOHS employee that he will be leaving as soon as this plane leaves and “we’ve already made one general announcement, no need to make any more announcements.” It was 10:15pm at this time and the plane was still at the gate and boarding had not yet begun. The display behind the gate still read 10:00pm. The customers were starting to line up outside the gate in anticipation of an announcement.

It was around 10:30pm they announced “boarding rows 70 to 84”, no pre-boarding for first class, business class, or for people with children. Since we were in row 36, we were stood behind everyone expecting to board at the end. I made a comment that they should let the kids board first. One of the fellow passenger over heard me and suggested we should just bypass the line and go to the front and try to board. I didn’t feel comfortable doing this so I let my wife and son go, they were allowed to board ahead of most of the people. There were other passengers with kids and disabled passengers boarding this way after they saw my wife and son board.

I was amazed that there were no announcement stating the flight would be delayed even more and if there was a pre-boarding for passengers with kids and/or disabled passengers. I felt sorry for those first and business class passengers who stood in line with the rest of us to board.

We arrived at the airport at about 6:30pm; check-in was a breeze, there was no one in the line since most people did not check for the delay and arrived on time. Usually there is a line of at least 20-30 people. Air India now seems to rent the Nippon Airways counter and its employees for their daily flight out of O’hare. The lady (most likely not an Air India employee) at the check-in counter informed me that all three of our seats were not together despite my travel agent having given me seat numbers. I asked the lady if she can get us three seats together since we were traveling with a toddler, she said she would look in to it. I asked for section B which is in the front behind the first class and she found us three seats in row 36 up to Bombay (BOM). However, she could not find three seats together on the domestic flight from BOM to AMD and asked us to switch seats with someone in the plane. As an afterthought I asked her if the connecting flight to AMD would wait for us and she has been told that they would wait. The connecting flight is a smaller flight, usually a 737 that takes the international passengers to the smaller airports. Usually I’ve been delayed on the smaller flights because the connecting international flight is late.

We had about two hours before the boarding so I decided to chill out at the airport bar, the waiting area at O’hare was packed because of Air India delays and other flights leaving at the same time. I managed to order a beer and spent time talking with my brother and his family and watching my son run around the airport lounge. I had to leave my CDMA Treo 650 behind since it wouldn’t work in India. It was difficult but I let my brother take it back for me. I felt disconnected from the world.