Flight Report: DEL-BKK Thai Airways – TG 316

Airline: Thai
Flight No. TG 316
Aircraft: Airbus A330-300
Aircraft Reg.: HS-TEK (pic below)
Flying Time: 4 hrs 5 mins.
Departure: 00:05 hrs (IST)
Arrival: 05:40 am (Thailand Time)

Our flight took the following path: –
>Delhi
>Kanpur
>Calcutta
>Over the Bay Of Bengal entering Burma
>Going through the outskirts of Rangoon (Yangoon).
>Crossing the top of Andaman Sea
>Then finally entering Thailand and Bangkok.

At around 9:30 pm I reached the airport from my home, which takes about 15 minutes to reach. The airport was not very crowded and also not very vacant as this is the peek time at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. From 10 pm to 1 am all international majors like SIA, Malaysian, Thai, KLM, BA, Air France, Lufthansa, Asiana etc. serve Delhi. I cleared all formalities, checked in and around 10:15 I was waiting in the waiting lounge. My flight was already there on gate number 2 but there was still time to kill. Photography is strictly prohibited so killing time was not that easy. When I entered the waiting lounge a bunch of people were watching a movie on a TV which was turned on loud…and this is nothing new at the airport. All these people were staff members. Anyway slowly people started coming and at around 11:20 pm the Thai staff called for boarding. I boarded the aircraft early to avoid the crowd as the flight was packed. My seat number was 38D on the A330 in special colour-scheme of Thai. The aircraft started taxing at around 00:10 am and finally we lifted off at around 00:15 am from the little bumpy runway of IGI International. The climb of the A330 was a negative climb as the aircraft after lifting of from the runway hovered about 200ft in the air over the runway before it really started lifting. The gears were retracted after 4-5 minutes of climb. The aircraft seemed to be 3301 version of Thai which are a little old…and it was clearly showing in the aircraft. Thai A330s don’t have PTVs but my seat was such that the small screen was right in front of me. There selection of shows is also not that good. They started off showing sights and sounds of Thailand, which I found quite interesting. Next they showed a show called Americas Funniest Home Videos with Bob Sagget, which brought a little cheer to the gloomy cabin of our flight. They showed very little of the route-map through out the flight.

Drinks were served and most people did not take drinks as half of the flight was asleep
(no I am not counting the pilot). Same was the case when they served breakfast when we were flying over Burma and entering the Andaman Sea. But I did take the meal and noticed one thing, the cutlery all was silverware except the knife which was plastic.

The flight was quite smooth, no turbulence. But again I found the Airbus A330 a uncomfortable aircraft. The seat layout was 2-4-2 and there was hardly any legroom so in comfort wise it was not a great flight. Thai service was not bad but not good also. There is a serious language problem in Thailand and you really have to put in an effort to make the airline people understand in English as they don’t know English that well, this is a major drawback I found in Thai. When they are operating such a vast network there crew should be fluent in English at least.

Finally at around 5:45 am we landed at Bangkok airport, the landing was as smooth as it gets.

Conclusion:

> Airline Analysis: Thai airways still has to improve a lot, it cannot be compared with airlines like SIA, SAS, AF and other majors. It still has to improve in its service and aircraft maintenance.

>Flight Analysis: Over all a moderate rated flight on the scale of 1 TO 10 I will rate it 6.
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Analysis of my flight from BKK-DEL in a few days with some pics from BKK.
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