hey maxpower you said because us airways is part of star alliance you got reward miles well air canada is part of star alliance too

I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at with that last one. You mean because Korean Air flight attendants aren’t trained, they’ve each killed 10 people? I find that hard to believe.

Our neighbors were burned alive on an AC plane headed for Canada back in the 80′s. I first flew AC ORD-YYZ back in the 90′s and couldn’t beleive the abominable condition of the DC-9 or how old and rude the flight attendants were. Last May, our BA flight back to the states was cancelled and we ended up on AC through Canada. I bought the only seats available, first class, and figured it would be comparable to BA or AA. We are still laughing about that trip. Six hours late, the food was inedible, the entertainment system, half the ovens and several WCs were not working…neither were the FAs…they stayed ganged-up gossiping around the galley. Our luggage arrived two days late and two pieces short. We’ve only been on one flight in 30 years that was worse, a SLM Suriname Airlines flight from Amsterdam, and they refunded our fare!

Body bags or not – check out the new Singapore Airlines A380 interior!!!

http://www.news.com/2300-11397_3-6215473-4.html?tag=ne.gall.pg

Look at #4 or First Class and #16 for Business Class.

Look, I am a Asian. I mind not know much about American or European airline but i am sure I know some facts about Asian airline.

Firstly, with common sense, NO airline just pick nice looking girls and let them on the plane the next day. They are trained and tested.

Secondly, as Grfxguy has said, people gain experience from a situation. you mind have worked in a airline for 20 years but never been in a accident. What the airline needs is someone that stay calm and remember rules even in a dangerous situation.
Thirdly, not all asian airline are good, I have to admid that some are rubbish. For example, Air Asia ( a Malaysian Airline). But some you can get a great experience with a cheap price to pay off, like China Airline.

Well, if you have money and you want to be comfortable, I’ll suggest you to take Singapore Airline or Thai Airline, they are both a member of Star Allience.

I will be flying from sydney to toronto with the stop in vancouver on the new 777 service and look forward to checking out the new economy product very much.

Pico Iyer knows a few things about flying. He seems to agree that Asian in-flight customer service is much better: http://jetlagged.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/the-friendliest-country-and-the-unfriendliest-skies/

I just spent a month traveling and flew on a few different airlines. Dragon Air, Air Asia, Asiana, Malaysia Air, and United. Only the latter one had old surly flight attendants, and only that one was enjoyable. And as others have noted above, being 50 doesn’t mean you’re any better equipped to handle a crash than someone 30. You both get the same training. It just means you’re 50.

I think Air Canada is not That Bad

I think the original idea, for the most part, was why can’t North American airlines attempt to meet this standard of service? It’s not even offered here, so how do we know it can’t work?

People are willing to pay extra to fly Virgin Airlines for the service and hospitality.

I just arrived home from Hawaii, and flew AC, United, and Hawaiian. AC was moderate, it still pisses me off that you only get a half can of pop, where everybody else gives you a full can. Seriously, and I think I speak for a lot of people, spend the other 25 cents and gimme a damn can. It’s the small things.

Also my TV didn’t work.

It’s “a lot” btw..

Consider this: Airlines in Asia are not bound by union and standard of life issues that AC and other north american airlines are bound by. If a FA or Customer Service Rep does not behave in a certain way, they are fired… no questions asked. Due to unions and civil rights movements etc. companies can not fire people on the spot, especially large companies like AA, AC… discount carriers are not necessarily bound by these same rules.

I’m sad to see people so quick to leave AC for other companies… I mean… lets keep Canadian money in Canada, at the very least if you leave AC go to Air Transat or Westjet.

I have to say that my many experiences with Air Canada have been Great. Always get great service, and the aircraft always seem to be kept in good repair. Same goes for KLM.

Maybe it is because I am always on the same flight(YYZ-LHR) I don’t know. But it seems that some people just have nothing better to do with thier time than bitch about stupid things.

If you have a problem with a service, and a complaint has been made, and the situation still has not been corrected, then move on!

If I go to a restaurant and see that it is crowded, I dont complain to my server that I had to wait 30 min. for a table since I was the idiot that saw how long the wait was going to be, and decided to stay anyway. That would be MY fault.

F/A’s for Air Canada do not make good money by the way. At most 23p/h and that is paid time from one gate to another. They do not get paid for boarding or depalneing(if I spelled that right?) or layovers or delays.

So give them some respect, because they work a lot of unpaid hours for their passengers, and even though you don’t want to admit it, they ARE there to save your ass in an emergency.

The problem is almost never the service workers such as F/A’s but almost always the customer! Sorry to those of you who find that offensive, but you obviously go into every service experience looking for something to complain about!

We’re not the one’s who keep digging this thing up, you guys are :)

Hey there Grfxguy,

Try this… The next time you fly with us (Air Canada) , just ask for the FULL can when ordering your drink. I serve countless cans a day (with a smile) :)

So next time try this novel idea… ask… U shall receive..

Hope your future travels with us are what you expect. We only try our BEST up there…..

Cheers!

The last Air Canada flight I was on was to/from Vancouver (with D4V). The flight going was average, even though D4V and I mocked the UI of the LCD touch screens. The flight returning wasn’t so great as we were on an older plane. No LCD’s, and every CRT was broken or scrambled.

AND, our return flight was DEAD. Complete rows were open, yet previous to boarding our flight, the computer system told us those seats (the empty ones) were full, so we couldn’t sit beside each other. I mean, we moved was we realized that everything was open… but the fact that they are telling customers that seats are full when they are in fact not booked at all makes you wonder… (btw, I’ve only found this out for Air Canada. For all I know, every airline does this).

In danger of beating a dead horse – here is a quick comparison of a recent flight (similar routing) between US Airways and Air Canada.

Booking/Check-in Service
- both booked online, no problems with booking, however US Airways allowed me to change seats online at any time from the time I booked to the time of the flight which was great.
- Air Canada’s website post-booking has less functionality

Planes
- US Airways – two old planes (including an insanely old 757) with interiors that needed to be updated. In-flight entertainment was essentially non-existant on old CRT screens and had to pay $5 for headphones. Free blankets & pillows.
- Air Canada – one old plane, one new plane (with seat back TVs!), however half of the plane’s seat back TVs were broken (including ours) so we had no in-flight entertainment at all. $5 blanket and pillows.
- AC wins as the new interior plane was nice, just wished the TVs worked.

On-time performance
US – one flight on-time, one flight 30 mins early
AC – one flight on-time, one flight 1 hr late

I’d say AC > US based on the one newly refurbished plane. Get all planes upgraded and the in flight entertainment working and thumbs up.

^ Ouch!

Booking classes is a complicated game if you book on any site other than the AC website or through a travel agent. Here is a good link to a description on all the booking classes and how many points you get from them.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22809

I’m trying to get credit currently for a flight I recently took which they didn’t give me points for because it was a “non-domestic” flight… uh what? I have to MAIL in my receipts (which are of course electronic and could be emailed, but no – snail mail please).

Okay, this is just pathetic. We all are Canadians here and I’m going to have to tell you die hard-fanatics here. Get real! If our companies are producing an inferior product, put it out in the open and address it and hopefully someday it’ll change.

ACPilotWannaBe: Keep Canadian money in Canada? Not a chance. If a foreign company is going to offer me a much better product, I’m taking it. With the hope that the loss of revenue will hopefully make them rethink the way they do business.

So get real guys. Air Canada has NOTHING on Singapore.

I flew on Singapore for Business on their 777 planes within Southeast Asia (comparable to a North American domestic flight in terms of distance) and on the A380 on a Transaltantic flight.

Even for a short 2 hour flight, the standards of SQ are high, they are friendly and they make you comfortable. Their level of professionalism is something you rarely find on any other airline, except perhaps Emirates or Qatar.

But Air Canada is miles away. Possibly better than American, Delta, United, Southwest or Jetblue but it still has nothing on Singapore.

It really boils down to training and how much resources the airline puts into the service aspect of their flight. But it is really up to the airline. Singapoer Air is the 2nd most profitable carrier in the world (behind Southwest which has a low cost advantage) and it can still offer the best service standards. What does this tell you?

Air Canada has gotten slightly better for me in recent years but they still have miles to go. Singapore Airlines is perhaps the finest airline in the world- its not benchmark for Air Canada. Try a more achievable benchmark.

Okay, this constant bickering absolutely has to stop. There have been too many wrongful accusations made for you all to consider yourselves civil (much less justified) in any way, shape or form. Before I present my views. I will present you with my credibility. I am a Canadian Commercial pilot who has flown Air Canada and WestJet (not to mention Canadian Airlines and Eastern Provincial Airways before they were acquired) and several other foreign airlines many times in the past, probably more so than many of you combined (don’t refute this point, I realize that I can’t say that with any real accuracy). I have also had the pleasure of personally flying a number of aircraft ranging from single engine Cessnas to multi-engine aluminum, pressurized monsters of the sky. I also have the benefit of my father being the most senior first officer on board the 767 aircraft in Air Canada’s fleet. These airplanes are old and as they are being phased out for replacement by the newer 787 fleet are not receiving an IFE (In flight Entertainment) upgrade, or an interior upgrade like the newer Airbus and Embraer models.
To cut to the chase, there are several points that I would like to make. Air Canada was originally a government owned and operated company and a little over 20 years ago was privatized. By my own opinion and my father’s, this was the worst thing that could have happened for the line because it unleashed the company onto to harsh Canadian market where the bottom line is everything and the company would rather cut services and hike rates rather than lose their cushy salaries. Thats right, you heard it from me, Air Canada management is a bunch of greedy corporate fatcats. Oh and by the way, I’m supposed to be supporting AC.
But don’t think it stops their, you might blame a shoddy trip on the personality of the flight attendants, well I’ll admit, sometimes they’re a little grumpy, probably because they are 20-somethings who didn’t realize what a terrible job they were getting into after high school. But usually they are acceptable at their jobs and will put in a decent amount of service to your needs and wants. On the other hand, it is well known in the aviation community that along with management, flight attendants are grossly overpaid. Sure they stand up and serve drinks, sure they have to deal with surly passengers, but so what? It takes all the skill of a restaurant server (I admit it is slightly more difficult, but you understand my point). Meanwhile, the pilot’s are pulling long hours up front, restricted to their seats for the most part (new regulations after 9/11 keep then pinned) in the cockpit, which on many aircraft is no more comfortable than coach seating; they are constantly working to perform systems checks, position reports and so much more (you might think that autopilot does it all, but what do you think happens on a trans-Atlantic flight to London when somewhere south of Iceland your airspeed starts to drop off mysteriously (as happened to my father on a recent flight)? You have to think fast and make good decisions. In this case my father and his captain lost 150 nautical miles per hour of airspeed before figuring out that a failing secondary fuel boost pump combined with vapor lock was reducing fuel flow to the number two engine, they quickly shut down the pump, switched to the primary reserve and were on their way. This sort of thing happens all the time in the airlines but we never know because thankfully our North American pilots are properly and thoroughly trained to fly under all circumstances, unlike many Asian pilots.
That brings up an interesting point, while I was undergoing my primary flight training several years ago, their was a flight school North of where I was training that served primarily Chinese students, brought to Canada by the Chinese government so they could be trained and then brought back to Asia to fly their airliners. Well I have (not to be stereotypical, just factual based on empirical evidence) never seen a more dangerous group of pilots. They have a reduced understanding of English (the international language of aviation) and instead of responding to repeated radio calls to delay their landing due to busy airport operations, chose to simply repeat the specific radio phraseology that they’ve been instructed to use, regardless of situation, and barge on in. In once instance, I filed a report for a near miss because while I was taking off and climbing through 1000 feet, a Chinese student, without even announcing his position, had decided to fly directly perpendicular through my flight corridor at an altitude just 100 feet above me, this was an unrecommended maneuver endangering the lives of himself, me and those on the ground. Chinese students also stereotypically only receive the minimum of training before being shipped off to fly big iron like the 737 (which in many cases is an obsolete aircraft bought from the North American airlines and then reused for a cheaper fair, despite underlying safety concerns).
Now you know why they can afford those cheap Asian ticket prices: cheap pilots, cheap airplanes and government run programs that suck money from the foreign economy and put it into low-paying oppressive labor forces that are tired and only smiling on the outside. Someday when one of those planes has an engine failure over the mountainous southern Japan, I can only say good luck to you in your nose-dive to the ground because the pilots won’t be helping you.
Now, back to Canada shall we? Our planes are new, or being replaced and just because they don’t have LCD TVs (poor poor you… sob) doesn’t mean they aren’t good airplanes. All the money that was supposed to let you play tetris instead of witnessing the amazing scenery instead is going into maintenance. Our planes are well kept and have very few mechanical problems compared to foreign ones and I’m proud to say that the last AC flight to experience a fatality was over 25 years ago, before most of the fleet was even introduced and before most employees even worked there. Also, our pilots are the best in the world, bar none. Look at the Gimli glider, the only reason those passengers survived is because the captain was also an experienced glider pilot and knew how to fly a plane with no engines. Tell that to your Asian rookies. Also, even many of our flight attendants, despite their surly attitudes know more about what they’re doing than anyone gives them credit for. In a recent incident where an AC pilot had a nervous breakdown on a trans-Atlantic flight, a replacement crew was brought in to help bring the plane back, the captain refused, opting instead to allow one of his flight attendants, an experienced commercial pilot, to assume co-pilot duties, bet your 18 year old Asian pretty girls can’t do that can they?
So there you have it, the only reason I’m stopping now is because I’m tired and its late, so if you want more, bring it on, I could go all day. And if you say my report is unsubstantiated and doesn’t have any real evidence, well then I offer you the same sentiment. Also, if you want it, I’ve got it, I know this world better than most and I won’t hesitate to cite actual reports from impartial judges. Anyway, I hope this helps settle your debate a little bit. and by the way, I don’t get flustered and angry like many of you do, I just get annoyed at the blind ignorance of you all, so don’t bother trying to get my goat with slander and false accusation because they won’t be addressed, and everyone here can say that it just makes you look like an idiot.

Thanks for reading,
Joe

Allow me to offer a rather crude summary of most of the entires here.

Air Canada Staffs are happy with Air Canada and the standards it offers, whereas Air Canada Passengers are disappointed.

Differences that could be telling in itself.

Joseph, I’m just curious. While I am surprised that one of AC’s flight attendants was able to double up as co-pilot, does that apply to one pilot-ready FA for every AC flight? I’m sure that was a pure coincidence. While I agree the “18 year old Asian pretty girls” can’t do that, it’s not their job in the first place.

I have to disagree on acceptability of flight attendants. From what I understand from the other postings, it appears that the service on AC as compared with other airlines like MAS and SIA is light years apart and this should not be the case. Any kind of person who is in customer service can testify that customer is king. If the FAs are grumpy, they can jolly well pass their jobs over to the next eagerly awaiting girl in line.

I have to also correct the misconception that “many Asian pilots” are not properly trained to fly. While I acknowledge there are indeed some cases, things have changed quite a bit and I can safely say that companies like SIA have an extremely stringent set of tests and interviews that siphon out only the best that will go on to qualify as pilots.