Paris, Saturday, 1995-11-04 05:45 local (Z+1)
These messages are piling up. I can't conveniently send out of India, and I keep winding up at the Nikko Hotel here in Paris with its phone system that doesn't deliver a dial tone. I'm going to try to get around that again in a while.
We got in here at about 15:00 local. I climbed in bed for what was intended to be just a few hours before sampling the Paris Friday night environment—wound up sleeping 12 hours. I woke up incredibly hungry, and have just returned from an unsuccessful attempt to find food. Paris may stay up late, but when they close down they really close down. There are no 24 hour supermarkets or convenience stores, at least not in the immediate area of the Nikko, and I know also not in the immediate area of the Meridien, which is a very commercial area. It's difficult to beat the U.S. when it comes to convenience of buying things in the wee small hours, and I miss that.
So, I was forced to the hotel room mini-bar (with its usual exorbitant prices) for some food. Surprise, no food, only drinks. I'm having a Coca-Cola for breakfast. Actually, it's just pre-breakfast. The hotel's buffet breakfast will open at 07:00 and I'll get something to eat. Then it will be stay up for awhile then back to bed for a late afternoon departure and fly all night back to Delhi then Bombay.
I'm now in the uncomfortable position of being the odd man in 4 man crews. Indian regulations require an additional pilot whenever the flight time is over 10 hours. Tower is having to conform to this requirement on this contract. So, somebody has to join an already established crew and then gets shuffled from crew to crew to supply the requirement for the fourth pilot. I came up with one crew, deadheading from Bombay to Delhi, and then displacing the f.o. for the Delhi to Paris leg. The bad thing about this is that you don't get to fly. The established crew switches legs, so the regular f.o. sits in the sea and flies when it's his turn. When the captain flies I displace the f.o. It's been 4 legs now since I've flown. Two of them I deadheaded and on two of them I was the non-flying pilot.
At least this last leg I was with a captain who has slightly more trouble understanding the foreign controller than I. To top it off, the controllers have real difficulty understanding him. He's Cuban and speaks with a heavy accent. That fact and the somewhat true stereotype of Latin temper contributed to a problem at Delhi. When Air India filed our flight plan, they either got our time of departure wrong or the air traffic control people recorded it wrong. It got listed as 06:15Z instead of 03:15Z. When we pushed back, Delhi ground control informed us that our estimated time of departure was still three hours off.
This would not cause a problem in the U.S. or in Europe. The controller would simply change it on the spot—probably wouldn't even bother to tell you he was doing it. Not so in India with their make-work, bureaucratic philosophy. The ground controller would not let us proceed, insisting that a new flight plan had to be filed. We sat for a solid hour, alternately calling ground control and Air India operations trying to get it straightened out. The captain's getting mad and his accent didn't help. Basically we wound up caught between Air India operations and Delhi ATC, neither one of which could bring themselves to admit they made an error. We, of course, were unable to tell who had actually made the mistake, Air India in filing or ATC in recording the filing. What finally broke the log jam, believe it or not, was that we had on board a packet of materials for India's Prime Minister, who is attending meeting in Paris. The courier carrying them, alarmed by the delay, informed us, and the captain told both ATC and Air India ops that since we were ready to go, it would not be our fault the prime minister didn't get his stuff in time for his next meeting, and we would ensure that everyone knew that. The ploy worked. Air India refiled the flight plan, and we were on our way.
The waste in Air India's operations is incredible. We had only 80 passengers on board for the Delhi to Paris leg. We were catered for a couple of hundred. It seems Air India has standard catering plans, and they cater to those categories regardless of the number on board. A U.S. airline, of course, caters for the number of passengers on board.
Everything having to do with Air India works poorly. For example, Tower Air's contract with Air India calls for them to pick up the hotel expenses. However, both at the Leela Kempenski in Bombay and the Nikko here in Paris, the hotels refuse to direct bill Air India because they don't pay their bills. So, Tower captains have to use their company supplied credit cards and then Tower bills Air India. Apparently Morris Nachtomi (Tower's owner—he still has 75% of the stock) is better at getting Air India to pay than are the hotels. Of course, he has a big lever—pay or we stop flying.
Interestlingly, when we go in to breakfast here at the Nikko with our little Air India breakfast coupons, we are directed to sit at the very back—second class all the way...or maybe third, or fourth...
In contrast to their waste, they pay very poorly—at least until recently when they first gave their pilots and then their mechanics 200% raises. On these Tower contract flights, there is one Air India cabin crew supervisor aboard to do translating and oversee Air India's interests. The guy on board this last leg will retire in a few months after having served 30 years. His current salary? $250 a month equivalent. This guy is a senior supervisor. Incredible.
Remember the situation from a previous message where we were stranded in Delhi because a crew that should have given the airplane to us at Delhi and deadheaded chose to operate instead of calling New York. Well, the shit has really hit the fan on that one. The DGCA (Directorate General Civil Aviation—the Indian equivalent of the FAA) has now gotten involved and is threatening to prohibit Tower from operating in India. It's all show and bluster, of course, but the investigation will give their bureaucracy a lot of grist with which to work.
Speaking of Indian bureaucracy, when we returned from Jeddah to Bombay, we had a deportee on board, an Indian being kicked out of Saudi Arabia. We got into Bombay around four in the morning, and they couldn't find the “man in charge of deportees”, so we all had to stay on the airplane waiting while they tried to round up this guy. After an hour, the captain said this was ridiculous, and we just left. This apparently flustered the Indian bureaucrats so badly they decided the best way to save face was to release the deportee rather than having to explain why their man didn't show up and why they had been unable to contain the crew. They brought him into the terminal with us and turned him loose, told him to go home, which of course is what they would have done eventually any way after having done the bureaucratic shuffle.
Okay, time to work on defeating the Nikko Hotel phone system...
...back again. My attempt to defeat the phone system (3 tries) has thus far failed. David, I think you have used CIM or WINCIM from various hotels. Have you figured out how to handle the problem of no dial tone. I'm attempting to handle it by changing phone.scr, the script file that controls the dialling and initial connection.
I went down to breakfast at exactly 07:00, the opening time. I forgot that the Japanese run ON TIME. The elevators were jammed with Japanese showing up for breakfast at the precisely designated time. Terrible breakfast, but maybe it's tailored to the Japanese. Interestingly, the Meridien Hotel where we usually stay when in Paris has the best scrambled eggs I have ever eaten at a hotel. This hotel has the worst.
There's an electronics store a short distance away that opens at 09:30. I'm going to try there to find an English speaker that may have some expertise on my problem.
Terry