Hello
I am quite amused by these barbs at "educated Indian passengers". Yes there can be occasional incidents of peopel being "excited" but then Indians do not have a monopoly on that as some of you tend to make out. Quite a lot of it is the attitude which atleast some of the crew have almost I would go as far to say "indoctrinated" as tho the "horror" flights to the Indian sub continent (as seems to be a pre conception the starter of the thread seems to have had in the first place!).
I fly fairly regularly out of India, the last one was on a middle eastern carrier from India to UK transitting enroute, and there were no such "horror incidents" at all. Infact I will be frank, even I was indoctrinated, advised to fly any western airline non stop/transitting via Europe because , this might be interresting to many of you here, the impression in the market given is "there is one level of service from India to the gulf and another level of service from the Gulf to UK". And this I have been hearing for years!
Well to come to my expereince , I decided to go ahgead anyway, to fly via Middle East, despite the stories I have heard, because the connnections were good and I wanted to avoid going all the way to MAA or BOM.
Well my experience! The flight to the middle east was full of Indian passengers- whatever classification you may give. The service was impeccable, not what I was told to expect, and the behaviour from the pax was also impeccable. Infact all the way to the UK the service was excellent without any differentiation which makes me think, whether to tell all the people who advised me NOT to fly via Gulf, that they were wrong!
But NOW, reading a minority of your posts, can you blame me in wondering whether this incident was a one off?
And also some body said about language problems. On the flight out of India, there was this eloquent annoucement that "other than English and Arabic, the crew also speaks Thai, French, Nepali and Spanish". Very impressive, but I did wonder considering that the airline concerned flies daily to where I started my trip and also since forecasting the profile in that particular flight (about which passenger speaks what in the flight) does not need a SUPER BRAIN, atleast the welcome /good bye message could also be pre recorded in the native tongue! I was gladly acting as a transalator to my seatmate, a first time travller who didnot unfortunately understand any of the numerous languages advertised as spoken , neither do I say that you should have crew proficient in all the languages of the world on the off chance that someone who knows only that language is on board, buit is it too much to have atleast a few "essential messages" atleast pre recorded on a language which is the mother tongue of 95% of the people on the flight day in day out?
To sum up, for the minority of you who seem to be intent on criticising a particular crowd of people, all I can say is it works both ways! You get what you deserve!
A posting from a SLF who travlled on a route in question,
And thanks to the crew and the airline who really made both both legs of my first flight with them one of the most memorable and with whom I will fly certainly fly again.
Cheers
From "an EDUCATED INDIAN PAX"