Trip to Bangalore (Part 1)

Kingfisher Xperience

In month of May-June, it becomes a little difficult to live in Delhi as temp can soar to a high of 44 degrees or maybe even more. And if it’s a humid day, then one can expect the worse. So, when dad asked me for a trip to Bangalore (that is Bengaluru now, but I prefer Bangalore) along with him, I readily agreed. He was going for some business conference & I was in full mood of enjoyment. This time he had booked tickets in Kingfisher airlines. It would be my first time in that particular airline and I was excited because it was only airline in India that provided an in flight entertainment system. The website boasted of Air-premier of newly released movies and had messages like channels powered by Dish TV. I began to wonder, since Dish TV is a satellite based DTH service provider, how could one view channels in the plane, since it not possible to have a receiver in a moving plane (because the direction of plane changes frequently, so every time the plane turned, one needed to reposition the receiver to the tune of satellite, if there was one!) to catch the signals relayed by the satellite!! It was only on my return trip I figured out that these were recorded programs, which were telecasted again & again and average length of one cycle of programs was about 2 hours and 30 mins. There was one channel which displayed the feed from camera placed on the nose of the plane. (But it was not a standard feature, some planes have it, some don’t.)It had 5 channels that telecasted previously hosted programs on TV like some episode of Laughter challenge, Just for laugh, funny videos, Ben 10, Sindbad, Tom & Jerry (one a single cartoon!!), Boss’s day out etc. There were highlights of Test match b\w India & Pakistan also shown on Ten sports (the one in which Viru made 309). The air-premiered movie was really disappointing; it was U Me aur Hum. Its entertainment system also had music channels which were 9 in number. 4 were Hindi and rest English. It was also recorded but they tried to give a look of a professional radio channel by having RJs speaking in between songs and occasional ads. I listened to English radio channels only, it was disappointing to see that runtime of songs was less that 1.5 hrs. While retuning, all the programs, songs, movie was same as that while going. Hence return flight was a major turn down. Also I had problem with the set of earphones provided, the right earphone would have very low volume compared to left one. I changed the set twice, but the problem remained. Thankfully I was carrying my mp3 played & thus I used my own set of earphones. Then, every time there was an announcement, the in flight entertainment system would come to a halt & you be forced to listen to that announcement, the music in your ears would be replaced by an announcement which you probably did not want to hear at the first place. And guess what…you have missed the part of the show/song/movie during time announcement was aired!!! Although Kingfisher is a good airline, I felt Spice-jet was better when came for value for money. Kingfisher was a premier airline, so I hoped to have a good, sumptuous meal in the aircraft. But there also I felt the quality of the foods sold in low cost airlines were better that this ‘premium’ airline’s “Gourmet”. The best part of the meal was the glass of fresh Lime they served before the meals and ofcourse water!!