Virgin Atlantic: London Heathrow to Delhi

My first experience of Virgin Atlantic has altogether been a fairly pleasant one, despite a few unimpressive incidents. At the departure gate, a range of magazines, including The Week, Hello, In Style and Stylist, are available for passengers to help themselves to. There was, unfortunately very little choice of newspaper however: The Daily Mail or The Financial Times were the only options. We were all warmly greeted when boarding the aircraft, with staff offering to help passsengers find their seats. A blanket and a pillow are left on every seat for the passengers to take as they board.

Just after take-off, every passenger is given a complementary pack, which includes a draw-string bag, sleeping socks, and eye mask, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste and a pen. Headphones are also handed out. There is a small screen on the back of every seat, which shows the current location of the plane and how it is progressing.

Later in the flight, a choice of movies, TV programmes, games and radio stations become available too. The choice of films was not very large, but it was a nice and very up to date selection.

About an hour after take-off, food and drinks were brought round. The choices for the meal were: chicken curry, roast chicken, or vegetable curry. Each main dish came with a starter of minted cous cous salad which was pretty dull- there was too much mint and little of anything else of flavour. Salad, I believe, was a hightly inapporopriate term for something in which the only vegetation was the mint and a very small amount of peppers. The chicken curry I chose ‘Kori Gashi’ was neither particularly bad nor particularly good. The daal that came with it, however, seemed to rely on being too hot, to mask a lack of any other taste. The paratha was too thick and slightly confusing- an incomprehensible combination of too oily yet too dry. To finish the meal, there was ‘Cococnut Prini’, a fairly non-descript, strangely textured, vaguely coconut-ty, overly sweet, jellyish mush.

Drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, were provided on demand and without limit throughout the flight. Breakfast was served at about an hour and a half beofre the scheduled landing time. The two choices were English breakfast or vegetarian Indian breakfast. The English breakfast that I had consisted of reasonable scambled eggs, a couple of nice little hash browns, and a not very pleasant meat patty with tomato sauce.

About half an hour before the scheduled landing time, we were informed that the airspace over Delhi was overcrowded which meant it was necessary to wait for it to clear before we could land. However, due to the plane not having enough fuel to wait until the airspace was clear, we had to take a diversion of abour 400 miles each way to Ahmadabad, to refuel. We were kept up to date with what the situation was throughout the delay, and countless apologies were given both by the captain and by the hotesses. In the end, we arrived at Delhi about 3 hours late, but after a pretty comfortable, fairly pleasant flight.