My "love affair" with BA118

Last Sunday during my morning terrace walk , Flightradar showed BA118 taking off from KIA . This flight always held a special place in my business air travels. It was always my preferred flight out of Bangalore during my business trips to Phoenix Honeywell Aerospace due to the single stop over at London. This flight still allowed me to have my family time on Saturdays and leave Bangalore on a Sunday morning and attend Monday Business meetings at Phoenix.

747s and later 777 aircrafts made up this flight which now boasts A350-1000 . Though I had posted about the opportunity to fly in BA A350 for the hundreds of Honeywell and other Aerospace engineers in Bangalore who worked on A350 program , I myself could not get the chance in BA due to my separation from Honeywell in 2019 . ( though I had flown the Qatar A350 in Europe )

Many memories of early morning interactions with courteous BA ground staff still linger including expressing my condolences when one of them met with a fatal accident while commuting to BIA a few days before my flight . I had experienced interesting delays including a long one till afternoon due to power outage at Heathrow due to which my family got bored when I would stop calling them to say I was at still at BIA gate.

Below experience ranks easily the top .. I always used my waiting time at boarding gate to catch up with my mails over the weekend. On one occasion I got so engrossed in mails that I missed the boarding call for my row and had to scamper in last with the laptop in my hand .. Only when I settled in my seat , I realized that I left my personal mobile phone in the seat at boarding area. As my personal mobile phone was a critically needed for Skype calls to my family during business travels , I darted back to the doors only to find that the doors are already closed and the air bridge had started moving away. I made frantic request to cabin officer who in turn relayed the same to the pilot. The pilot was gracious enough to request for air bridge to be connected again and I could get down to the permitted area and request the ground staff for locating my mobile . With shouts "Sir , you are holding up a 777 with 300 or more passengers "they did locate and gave my mobile phone and allowed me to run back the air bridge..

Thanks BA for the wonder service through BA 118 !