The journey continued towards India from Oman. We had been told that India is a very “interesting” country for those of us that like airport administration. Anyhow, we had decided to go with selfhandling, which means that you take care about all the formalities upon arrival yourself. The main reason for selfhandling in India is the skyhigh prices for these services (something like 400 – 1400 US$). Therefore we were very curious about what would follow upon arrival in Mumbai (Bombay). The flight was a very warm one, sitting in our survival suits flying over the Arabic sea while the sun was shining almost straight from above. The first sight of Mumbai was not actually the city, the first thing we saw was a denser cloud of smog rising up in the horizon. Mumbai is actually the second largest city after Shanghai, and the city is totally overloaded with cars and other vehicles. After a localizer landing to runway 27 we taxied in to stand number 71 in the cargo area of the big airport. After only two minutes we counted the number of persons to 23(!), Guards, Customs, Airport authority, Handlers, Police etc etc. They were quite confused when we told them that we would go for selfhandling. After some discussions they said it could be possible but there would be no way of getting from the aircraft to the terminal… After explaining about the WFH project there seemed to be hope of getting help with some transports to the terminal, after a while we got to ride all over the airport in different kind of vehicles when we went through the various steps of immigration, customs and other instances.
After three hours we were done and could meet up with Capt Mihir Bhagvati who is part of the Mumbai flying club. After some interesting discussions regarding general aviation in India and Mumbai in particular, we got to know that there are only 75 people within General Aviation in a city with more than 16 millions inhabitants!

Johan is refuelling the aircraft prior to takeoff

Sight of Oman upon takeoff

The route to India

A happy smile over the Arabic sea

The next day started with a presentation about the WFH project at a big Lions conference, the local distributor of GN ReSound had on a short notice there given us the possibility to present the project. Then followed some media interviews and a short sightseeing of Mumbai. The evening consisted of a hard of hearing event together with JOSH (a society for speech and hard of hearing) which also had a lot of journalists in place, the three largest Indian TV channels as well as two major newspapers were there covering our story, this meant a lot of publicity in a country with approx 1 billion inhabitants!

Johan is holding a speech at a Lions conference

Vinno and Vikram from GN Resound took really good care of us!

Lecture for the JOSH association

A lot of media contacts this evening

A lot of interested hard of hearing people

My impression of this giant city is that there are people everywhere! A lot of segregation between rich and poor people is very present with areas of slum where you wouldn’t believe that people have to live in. Everywhere you go there are cars and taxis honking the horn constantly, people rushing around and commerce of everything you can think of, all this in a 34 degree temperature and high humidity.

Mumbai is a hectic city!

After a couple of days in Mumbai we were getting ready to takeoff for Kolkata (Calcutta). Now we got very good help from Cpt Mihir, he took us to the airport the night before we planned to take off, just to clear some of the administration and get the aircraft refueled. I can tell you that this was worth a lot! The total time of administration and refuelling summed up to 7 hours! For a domestic flight! I’ll describe the procedure in an own part on the blog!

Written by Henrik