I and a friend were to end our trip to India with AI137 from Delhi to Frankfurt on 9/24/05. Of course there were also hundreds more passengers, Indians, Germans, Italians, Swiss and Belgian. The flight was supposed to take off at 7:30am. After sitting in the jet a while the pilot let on that there was a problem with the brakes and he would not fly it.

He announced that the plane we could see to our right would be used instead and we would continue to that one without needing to go through security again. This never happened and it was announced that another jet was being flown in for us. This never happened. No Air India employees could provide real information on when we would really be able to take off.

After sitting around 5-6 hours on the jet we were herded off to various gates a while for the brakes to be worked on. At this point a friend requested a blanket for me because I had a high fever and chills in the cold airport and was simply told NO!

At 1pm we were again herded into a filthy bus (at least the one I was in) and to the Centaur Hotel. My room had a wet mould stain growing in one corner. At 11PM more busloads of people arrived and we were carted back to the airport - according to AI because we had a flight at 1AM.

We boarded a plane many hours after 1AM and this also didn't take off. The pilot still refused to fly it. (Apparently no other jets are available in Air India’s entire "FLEET")

After being shuttled around more gates we were told to collect our baggage and we would be carted back to the Centaur again. The moving of baggage made it easy for at least one of our passenger's luggage to be picked off by thieves.

One of the Indian nationals got a hold of a reporter from NDTV who met us out front of the airport and we did a TV interview in hopes of making Air India ashamed enough of their behavior to provide another plane.

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