Platform7

Very much like every Keralite working in Bangalore, one of my favorite time passes is to keep hunting for tickets to go home everytime my college (office) shuts for two consecutive days or more. While hunting for holidays on our holiday list, I found two consecutive holidays in the middle of September - add two days to it, and I get a 5 day vacation at home. I was unsure of getting two more days off, and I had to book for a two day trip. I found a great round trip fare on India's biggest airline - IndiGo. The only catch being that the fare is non-refundable. Since the fare was great, I decided to go ahead and make a booking. I have a jinx with trips planned in advance - they never happen as planned, and this trip was no different. Infact, a trip just before this trip was cancelled, forfeiting the entire booking amount! As fate would have it, the return leg of this trip was not utilized - and I too a long way to come back (more about that in the coming posts). The booking was don

The Chennai-Bangalore sector is now dominated by turboprops! The sector sees as many as 8 ATRs from Jet Airways and 4 Dash Q400s by SpiceJet. The only 'bigger' aircrafts are 2x IndiGo (A320) and a 1x Air India (A320). Then there is a thrice weekly ATR from Air Pegasus as well. With my love for Turboprops, I could very easy narrow down by choices. Oh! Why did I say all this?  I was looking for tickets to return from Chennai, after a two day outing there. I initially toyed the idea of taking a bus - but the evening and night buses from Chennai were sold at a thousand rupees or more. I certainly do not like paying exorbitant prices for a short distance bus journey. Soon after realising that taking a bus isn't really an option, I moved my search to my favorite OTA, Cleartrip. I found a couple of cheap options for Monday morning - a quick search was made on more OTAs to hunt for the cheapest fares for that flight, and I got the best fares from the website of my credit card

An airline that caught my fancy ever since it was announced was Air Pegasus. For some reason, the name struck a chord with me, and I awaited their first flight for a long time. The first pictures of their first aircraft attracted me even further - the aircraft featured a nice smiley on the nose! Another fact that attracted me was that they flew the ATR72 - and I love them for some reason. Air Pegasus took off in mid-April this year with one ATR72, that flew earlier for Kingfisher. Another aircraft joined their fleet last month (also ex-Kingfisher). The opportunity to fly Air Pegasus never came until they started flying to Chennai. I had been planning an outing  to Chennai since a very long time, and this came as an opportunity. The catch being that they flew only three times a week, a late morning departure from Bangalore. Thats the "Smiling Plane" :) I finally booked for a Saturday flight from Bangalore. The flight leaves Bangalore at 1025hrs on Mondays, Fridays and Sa