Air India, yet another epic fail: 11 out of 12 broken toilets on board, Boeing 777 must turn around after 5 hours in flight

You certainly don't change reliability and customer service by buying a bunch of new airplanes and painting them in a garish yet elegant livery. Thus, As its new Airbus A350s began flying around the world., Air India continues to earn slime shovels on aviation news sites and social media: Old, poorly maintained, dirty, smelly planes, even in business class and in what Air India has the audacity to call First Class. And then there is the aspect of customer care when something goes wrong, before or during the flight....

The Barbone, Matteo Rainisio knows something about this. described his family trip to Australia a few months ago with Air Inda as one of his worst flying experiences.

Something equally, if not more, unpleasant happened a few days ago to the Nearly 300 passengers on flight AI 126, operated by Air India with a Boeing 777-300ER on the approximately 14-hour route between Chicago and Delhi: the 'poor people' they shot off almost 10 hours of flight time only to find themselves back where they started (Chicago), with only two company staff assisting them with the paperwork related to hotel accommodations and the rebooking of their trip to the Indian capital.

AI 126 flight track reported on Flightradar24 on March 5. sees it, after taking off from O'Hare, fly over Canadian Ontario and northern Quebec before crossing the Labrador Sea (Northwest Atlantic), bypassing the southern tip of Greenland, and then, a little further on, making a 'u-turn,' re-aiming its nose in a southwesterly direction and returning to Chicago.

The whole thing, from takeoff to landing, took a whopping 9 hours and 44 minutes of flight time, at the end of which the unfortunate passengers found themselves back at the starting point.

Yeah, but What caused the 'about-face'? The toilets. Or rather, the non-functioning toilets. The Boeing 777-300ER has as many as 12 of them available to passengers. Apparently, AI 126 had left that day with already some toilets out of order and then, during the first four and a half hours of the flight, all but one ended up 'out of order'.

Now, to think of 'pulling' from Greenland to Delhi (9 hours) with only one working toilet for nearly 300 passengers, and with the risk of even the last one getting stuck, was unthinkable. The smarter move would have been to proceed to London Heathrow, which was at that point closer than Chicago and where Air India has a large base, were it not that London hub has 'curfew' (curfew) at night.

So the pilots, evidently in agreement with the company, decided to return to their point of departure, from where they had taken off at 11:24 a.m. and where they landed again at 9:08 p.m.

Once disembarked, the exhausted passengers (some must have had to 'hold it' for a few hours) were refreshed, quickly rebooked on other flights to Delhi and then 'settled' in hotels around O'Hare. But go figure.

Instead, they have found waiting for them two 'poor' Air India employees who could not efficiently cope with nearly 300 people waiting for hotel accommodation and rebooking, to the point that some Delta employees would rush to their aid before the situation escalated. Toilet repair took the better part of two days, and on March 7, the Boeing 777 made its way back to India.

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