Air India: Because of the convenient schedule and the slightly lower price compared to the alternatives, I made the enormous mistake of booking tickets on Air India. I have flown intercontinental routes more times than I care to remember, but I have never, ever, ever seen anything remotely similar to the infuriating incompetence and deplorable aircraft quality that Air India regularly subjects its unfortunate passengers to.

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WARNING: long rant to follow
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Here is a short recap of my experiences

Chapter 1: The way over.
The trip on the way to India was mostly uneventful. The fun started in Bangalore where we arrived about a couple of hours late (2 a.m. instead of midnight), and then had to wait an additional hour for our bags. I could most liken the terminal to a gas station public bathroom in cleanliness and general state of repair, although I'm almost positive that the bathroom has more seats. My bag decided not to show up, so I spent another amusing hour trying to get the paperwork completed (yes, it was actual pen-and-paper-work, no computers anywhere!). I even got to visit the Air India management office upstairs, which would have been an ideal choice to film a WWII interrogation chamber scene – a tiny, poorly lit room with shriveling, discolored paint on the wall, occupied by a fold-up table with a PC-XT style computer on it. I'm eternally grateful for the cab driver who held out for me until the very end.

Chapter 2: the way back.
I don't know where one would find the serial number on a 747, but I'm willing to bet that the plane I was flying had the number 000001 or thereabouts. Ever since the fall of communism in Hungary I haven't witnessed aircraft of such considerable age in active service. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if they started charging us museum admission instead of airfare.

My planned route would have taken me from Bangalore to Chicago on the same plane, with a short stop in Mumbai and Frankfurt. The flight was habitually an hour late leaving Bangalore, where the intercontinental terminal consists of a smallish room and a single gate. It takes considerable effort to figure out when you are supposed to pass through that gate, as the announcements are vague at best, and the subway-style crowd produces a lot of noise (imagine about 5 intercontinental flights worth of passengers crammed into the smallest hole they can fit). As far as I know there were 4 Air India flights going from India to different destinations in the US on that day. The first one got indeterminately delayed in Bangalore.

Chapter 3: Mumbai
The first sign of trouble was that we got unloaded in Mumbai (where the ongoing passengers should have been able to stay onboard), and we were told that there would be a change of aircraft. Next came a couple of additional hours in another tiny waiting area, with only a few chairs (obviously), and zero information forthcoming on our intermediate future (obviously). While waiting for our plane we heard an announcement that Mumbai would be the final resting place of the second Air India flight to the US that thay. Eventually we were allowed to board – trouble sign #2 – the very same plane that they considered un-airworthy just a few hours before.

The trip from Mumbai to Frankfurt proved uneventful with most of the channels on the in-flight entertainment broken – the tape usually became unplayable about halfway through the movie to inflict maximum annoyance.

Chapter 4: Frankfurt
When we landed some additional confusion followed, until the airport personnel (and not Air India's representative!) announced that the plane will not be allowed to leave (my memories at this point are quite hazy from having spent more than half a day on planes and in waiting rooms, but I seem to recall that "allowed" was the actual word they used – which leads me to wonder if there may have been a difference of opinion between the crew and the airport on what constitutes a working plane). (For those of you keeping score: this was the third of the four flights to the US that didn't make it all the way that day.) We were told to grab our bags and head out to a hotel that was yet to be determined.

Enjoying the privileges of an EU citizen, I quickly slipped through immigration and customs and ended up next to the baggage carousel. The carousel was already crammed full of bags at this point, which prevented additional bags coming out. In the meantime we got word that the Indian citizens (or is "nationals" the fashionable Bush-word nowadays?) on the plane need to get EU visas, and it's going to be a while before they show up for the bags (that "while" later turned out to be about 12-14 hours – so they got it even worse than us). Once it was abundantly established that we were on our own, we tried to convince the local airport staff to take the bags off the carousel so that our bags can come out. They vehemently refused for reasons known only to them and their supervisors.

So me and a couple of other guys spent the next hour or so rearranging and removing bags from the carousel until we struck gold and ours emerged. Then we were driven to a nearby hotel, where we were informed of the following factoids: 1. that we will need to select a room-buddy, as they only had enough rooms if we doubled up, 2. that there were no extra rooms, so even if we paid we couldn't get a room of our own, 3. that we absolutely, positively had to be in that particular hotel, otherwise we wouldn't be able to get our tickets for the rest of the trip and 4. that we needed to be in the lobby by 7 am where they would announce what came next.

Going up to the room me and my roomie were surprised (well, actually at this point I may have been in a zen state of unsurprisability) to discover that there was only one bed in there! I elected to sleep on the floor, as I often do that anyway... The next morning we headed down to find a lobby covered in immense amounts of baggage, people and noise. A lone Air India representative would occasionally shout out names for the next 4 hours, offering no extra information otherwise. (I was quite helpfully advised by fellow passengers with previous AI experience that this sort of stuff is quite normal indeed.) Around 11 they decided to ship us back to the airport and stand us in a nice long line at a counter (yes, that is ONE counter). After a few more hours in the line I was given a ticket through Los Angeles LAX on another Air India flight.

Chapter 5: LAX
I had a connection to a regional flight to SLC with only about an hour to spare in LA. Since Air India faithfully kept their standard of being at least an hour late, I ended up with zero time to spare. I ran past most of the passengers in the corridor to be the first in line for immigration, just to keep my hopes of reaching the SLC flight alive. After that I had to literally jog from one end of the airport to the other, go though a "randomly selected" ridiculous safety check – then go through it again as the highly qualified TSA person in charge forgot to put a stamp somewhere he should have (which is quite possibly the only reason for his employment, as the actual security check is clearly useless) – and arrive to the plane literally at the moment when they were closing the doors.

Chapter 6: SLC
The LAX-SLC flight was right on time, and only about a day and a half later than I expected I was finally back in beautiful Salt Lake City. They somehow even managed to get my bags there in one piece.

In conclusion: be forewarned – Air India is strictly a third world airline, and anyone who can possibly afford anything better shouldn't even consider travelling with them! Even if the next cheapest alternative is hundreds of dollars more expensive, consider whether the difference is worth being a day or two late, standing around airports, hotel lobbies and such for that day or two, occasionally interrupted by a strenous free-form excercise program consisting of weight lifting and short-distance running among other things.