Geoff Arnold

A rant deferred: Bangalore airport

My colleague Mani Chandrasekaran just posted a piece about the new Bangalore airport which is due to be completed in 2008. He began by saying "Most airports, in India, dont really compare to the modern airports around the world", which reminded me that I had promised you a little rant about my experiences at Bangalore airport. So here it is.

If you remember, I was flying from Bangalore to Mumbai to connect with a flight to London. My Jet Airways flight from Bangalore was repeatedly delayed, and I wound up missing my connection. In these circumstances, when you're stuck in the departure lounge waiting for a flight, most people need two things: refreshment and information.

1. Refreshments: none. Correction: one water fountain of dubious quality, and nothing else: no food, no beverages. No bottled water, no vending machines, no kiosk, no cafe. Zip.

2. Information: Here's where it really gets absurd. Scattered around the lounge were half a dozen televisions. These were used for three purposes: to show advertisements, to display flight information, and to carry a live TV feed. There was no other source of flight information. It quickly became apparent that there was no particular sequence or tempo as to what was shown when. Unless you watched intently you were likely to miss the occasional brief flight status displays.

   But it gets worse. It just so happened that India was playing Sri Lanka at cricket that evening, and the match was very exciting. India was winning: many of the ~250 waiting travellers jostled for the best seats to watch the TV, and when their heroes like Tendulkar and Sehwag were facing the bowling you could forget about anything else. Whoever was controlling the system wasn't going to bother with trivia like flight information (or even advertising). At one point there were 20 uninterrupted minutes of cricket....

I would have taken a few pictures of this place for you, but of course photography is absolutely forbidden at all Indian airports. In any case, the lesson is clear: if you're going to fly out of Bangalore, make sure you have bottled water and snacks with you, and be prepared to grab a seat in front of the TV. And if anyone from the airport reads this, I'm sure you can afford a few extra monitors to dedicate to flight information. Because we're not there to watch cricket, we're bloody well there to fly!

(Thanks. I feel much better now.)

P.S. The December'05 issue of Airliner World (excellent magazine, lousy website) includes a piece on p.68 about the critical state of the commercial aviation infrastructure in India. Airport parking places, terminal facilities, ground services, air traffic control - in every area, demand is outstripping supply, exposing a serious lack of investment. And this also applies to aircrew: a conservative estimate is that India needs an extra 1,200 pilots.

Random preparations

1. Rather than relying on phones while travelling, I hope to be using iChat AV a fair amount. I picked up an iSight camera for Merry to use with her iBook. Then yesterday and today I spent some time debugging video chat with Merry, Kate, and a colleague of mine who just happened to be in Singapore this weekend. Looks promising.

   (There was only one dumb ease-of-use issue: in order to video chat, it's necessary to open up five ports in the OS X firewall, and for some reason there's no preset configuration that you can simply check off. Instead you need to define a new profile associated with TCP ports 5060, 5190, 5297, 5298 and 5678. That didn't feel very Mac-like.)

2. On Friday I was talking with Jim Waldo (of Jini fame) and I mentioned an iTunes playlist of mine called Music to blow your speakers out. He dragged me back to his office and introduced me to Tool. I was blown away, in more senses than one: I've only known Jim as a jazz enthusiast, and Tool's Ænima was unexpected, to say the least. But I was intrigued, and this lunchtime, while running to the drug store to pick up a few items, I made a detour to Newbury Comics and picked up a copy of the CD. (Oddly it's not available through ITMS.) I've ripped it into iTunes and added it to my iPod; I'll listen to more of it over the Atlantic tonight.

3. Checking in. Well, trying to. I logged on to the British Airways website (after finally realizing which of the four or five ticket numbers and record locators to use), changed my seat on the BOM-LHR leg (no more 53J!), and then tried to check in. And tried. And waited, and tried again. After receiving a number of different error messages, I finally received a vaguely catatonic "Unfortunately our systems are not responding at this time." Oops.

4. In spite of my earlier intentions, I decided not to get up to watch the Chinese GP. I didn't even record it. (No, I don't have a TiVo.) A pity - it would have been interesting to see Montoya's car being ripped apart by a manhole cover (or grating, whatever), not to mention the delicious schadenfreude of watching Schumacher making a fool of himself twice in a single race (the first time before the race had even started!).

More gliding stuff

Here's a 14MB QuickTime video of the landing on the grass gravel.

And here are some pictures, of distinctly variable quality - click thumbnail for larger image.

Mile High Gliding

This morning I drove up to Boulder Airport, to MileHighGliding, and spent a glorious 45 minutes or more soaring over the front range and downtown Boulder. It was my first time in a glider, and it was simply wonderful. I was in the front seat with Chris, the pilot, behind me. We spent the first ten minutes being towed up from 5300 ft. (the altitude of the airport) to about 11000 ft.; then the tow was released. [See pic - click for larger.] We got a good thermal over the Flatiron formation (steeply inclined strata that make up the very edge of the Front Range), and spent about 10 minutes there without losing any height. After orbiting the Flatirons and Eldorado Canyon, we drifted southeast towards StorageTek (skirting the controlled airspace around Jeffco), before heading back towards the University and the industrial area to the east side of Boulder. Chris executed a couple of stalls and wingovers, which felt marvellous; we pulled around 2G climbing out of the stall. After that we crossed the airfield, pulled a tight left base, and landed on the "grass" (mostly gravel) to the north of the runway. Outstanding!

I took a number of pictures, though the quality isn't particularly good: as you can see, the canopy gets in the way. I've also got a nice video clip of the landing, which I'll put up as soon as I've figured where to do it.