I returned to the U.S. from my three week vacation in India on November 18th, with a flight around 2:30am on the 19th.
The trip to the airport in Mumbai was fine.
Once in the airport I checked in and dumped my bags with the airline for the trip, then paced up and down the nonsecure parts of the terminal looking for a quiet place to sit and fill in the immigration form. There was a small lounge that was jam packed with people at the far, far end of the terminal from where I checked in.
Finishing that, I got in line for Immigration (which technically, should be Emigration, since it's for exiting India). There were two lines, both of which stretched completely out of the Immigration hall's roped queues and freeform into the terminal. While I was waiting, some guy tried to go through the First Class and Diplomatic line, which is shorter, telling the gov't security woman "I'm a platinum customer" and when she said nothing, and didn't open the rope he started yelling "PLATINUM, DO YOU KNOW WHAT PLAT -- I -- NUM MEANS?" and she still didn't let him through, so he got in the regular line.
Behind me in line was a young woman who whenever the line inched forward would walk ahead until she hit me, never just stopping a few inches behind me. The line took about 40 minutes or so until my turn at an Immigration counter, where I had no troubles and didn't get any questions from the officer.
Through there the line formed for the security check. There was a bottleneck in that two officers checked all the passengers' passports and boarding cards for the fresh Immigration stamp, then there were the roped queues going to the actual security checks. The security check was like it always is in Mumbai, chaotic and confusing about where to go, which line to be in, and a longer time separated from my bag than at other airports. It took another 20 or 30 minutes…
Once through I found a seat in a somewhat quiet lounge in the terminal to call Leena and talk for a bit...
After she and I got off the phone I just sort paced around the terminal. There wasn't any food that seemed appealing at the time, so I was a little hungry, but didn't get anything. I kept using the bathrooms, too, to empty myself out for the travel.
We started boarding at the time I sent Leena an SMS (which was quite a struggle because I forgot how the old Motorola RAZR worked…) to say I was on my way...
I got a window seat for the flight from Mumbai to London, so that was good… I slept for around 4 continuous hours when they dimmed the lights, and then off and on later. The whole flight was in night time, with the dawn some way behind us, but getting closer and closer throughout...
I got to my seat early in the boarding process because it was so far in the back. That was when I opened my backpack to get out my sweatshirt that I noticed my new, $1,500 Canon 35mm f/1.4 lens was not there...
It wasn't until the plane was nearly full and few people were still getting on that my row-mates arrived… They were an elderly Gujarati couple. The wife took the aisle seat and the man took the middle one, immediately spreading his legs wide so he encroached on my space. And smelled kind of bad…
Both of them coughed horribly throughout the whole flight, without covering their mouths or anything. The woman looked like she was pretty sick most of the time. She refused all food and spent a lot of the flight with her head against the seat in front of her.
When the meal came around, the flight attendant asked me if I wanted the egg or the idli & upma option, but asked them if they wanted veg or non-veg. The man got veg, which I also got, since the non-veg one was scrambled eggs, which I don't like.
I take it the older couple are not seasoned, worldly travelers… The man opened his meal and didn't recognize the idli, sambar or upma, all three of which originated in south India but are now common everywhere. For each one of them he asked me, "what this?" and when I told him he asked, "is vegetarian?".
Near the end of the flight the flight attendants handed out suggestion and rating cards to some passengers to fill, about how the airline performed. After I finished filling my rating card, the guy next to me handed me the couple's U.K. Immigration Landing Cards and their passports and sort of asked me to fill them out, because neither of them speaks or reads enough English for that… So, I started with one, copying the details from the man's passport (that's how I know they were Gujarati…) onto the Landing Card.
I filled all of it except the details about their stay in the U.K. and when I asked, the guy said they were going to London. But I'd noticed his Indian passport had been issued in San Francisco, so I guessed they have relatives in the U.S. and might be visiting there, so I asked "U.S.?" and he said "Los Angeles" and showed me his boarding pass for a flight from London to Los Angeles.
At that point, I couldn't ask in Hindi or English for him to understand whether or not they were spending any time in the U.K. that would require them to go through Immigration. I rang for a flight attendant and when she showed up I explained the problem and she asked the guy in Hindi about their travel plans, finding that they weren't leaving Heathrow Airport, so they didn't need the cards at all…
The couple split up after we landed, the man getting off the plane while the woman stood in the aisle and indicated for me and others to go ahead of her. Maybe she needed assistance getting off and was waiting for a wheelchair or something, I'm not sure. She definitely didn't look well, so it's a possibility.
It was a long, long walk from the plane to the first sign for transfer passengers showing what terminal to go to for the next flight. I stood around a little bit to see if I'd see them so I could tell them where to go, but they never showed up. If she needed assistance then probably the airline person who helped would also get them to the right place.
It turned out to be a lot more walking to get to the bus between terminals, which I just barely got on before the doors closed and the bus left the terminal. And then in that other terminal another security checkpoint for transfer passengers. It was smaller, yet more confusing and chaotic than the regular security checkpoints for passengers entering the airport there at Heathrow. But I got through okay, and into the terminal…
I didn't have all that long to wait until the gate opened for my flight to New York. At the gate when I handed my boarding card and passport to the woman it gave her some kind of error, then it worked, but she still had some trouble. She got another gate agent to help her with what to do, and he asked me to step aside while he did a bunch of things, running the boarding card through the scanner and my passport through it and a tremendous amount of typing on the computer before he finally handed it to me and said "it's okay" and waved me into the waiting lounge… I don't know what that was about, maybe the barcode from the Mumbai airport's computer wasn't compatible or something like that… Weird…
For this flight I had an aisle seat next to a window seat in the very last row of the plane. The woman with the window seat was an extremely large woman who needed to get an extension for the seatbelt to go around her bulk. I was already sitting there when she came back and saw her seat and apologized to me about my having to be crammed in next to someone of her size. And she did encroach into my space a bit, simply because she was so big...
Otherwise, the flight was fine. I didn't sleep at all on it, just read stuff on my iPad most of the time. Virgin Atlantic heats their planes more than other airlines, so I was comfortable the whole flight in short sleeves.
Once at JFK the Immigration line was slow, with only two agents handling the line for U.S. citizens, but no problems there. Baggage claim was okay, I got my bags fine, and then the line at Customs was chaotic, with a single desk and one agent on each side of it, but no defined queue for people to get into. When I got to an agent he just looked at my forms and said "welcome home," and passed me through to the exit.
I had to wait in line for a taxi but got one to Brooklyn. That was $34 so I gave him $40 and he helped me with my bags to the door and all that…
So, both Jet Airways and Virgin Atlantic were fine airlines to fly with. There service on board both of them was good, the meals were, well, airline food, but not bad. Virgin Atlantic's food service had several rounds of snacks, that were good stuff, including high tea…
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